


The Weakening Eye of Day

by orphan_account



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: M/M, Post Apocalyptic AU, broken!Jack, non-graphic necrophilia, really - Freeform, sorry if that last tag scares you I swear it's not that bad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-06
Updated: 2016-06-12
Packaged: 2017-11-28 13:20:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 31,584
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/674844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pitch hadn't been joking when he said he planned to rule humankind with fear. Fear was what had set off the bombs. Fear was what had initiated nuclear winter. Fear was what kept all the humans hungry, huddled, and wide eyed in this new world of ice and shadow.</p><p>But Pitch discovers his name is not what the survivors fear most.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [suchcolours.tumblr.com](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=suchcolours.tumblr.com).



> Title taken from the first half of the poem "The Darkling Thrush":
> 
> _I leant upon a coppice gate_  
>  When Frost was spectre-grey,  
> And Winter's dregs made desolate  
> The weakening eye of day.

Everything had gone more spectacularly than Pitch had ever thought it might. Not even the wildest expanses of his imagination could've captured the sheer magnitude of the power that Jack Frost had turned out to possess.

True, he had come to Jack wishing for an ally. He had explained to Jack that his trick had only been to help Jack see that the Guardians only guarded themselves. They valued the children because the children kept them powerful, immortal... But Pitch, and Pitch alone, actually saw value in Jack. In the dejected boy with blue eyes swollen from crying, with purple lips chilled from a memory long since passed, with arms and legs and soul trembling, silently begging to be comforted so that they might still, he saw not a potential pawn, but a true ally. Truly, someone who understood his loneliness, someone who could come to understand the full capacity of his contempt for the overbearing, self serving Guardians.

Still... He had never imagined, not in all the time it took to coax Jack over to him, not in all the planning he'd done and the extensive research on the Guardian's and their personalities and weaknesses he'd conducted, that Jack Frost would turn out to be his trump card. All he'd been looking for in the boy was a faithful companion- perhaps to neutralize the problem of dealing with yet another Guardian- and yet... And yet he'd found a war machine, instead.

Yes, Pitch wistfully recalled the night that the Guardians had made their last stand. Pitch's nightmares had been running amok all over the globe, capturing baby teeth, breaking eggs. They'd already tainted the dreams that Sanderson had tried so very hard to keep pure. What was he saying? He'd tainted Sanderson, himself! Turned him into nothing more than sand... Well. Black sand, that is.

But the real, crowning achievement of the battle, he couldn't take credit for. He couldn't take credit for the way that the Guardians had risen when they saw Jack, the way that their eyes held delicate, fragile hope when he emerged from the shadows, cradling the body of a child. A boy that Jack had called Jamie... The last remaining light. All that held the Guardians' lives and powers rested in Jack's arms, shaking and wide eyed and clutching so tightly to Jack that frost had started to cover the boy's thin, knobbly knuckles.

"Do you see them, Jamie?" Jack had asked, voice very soft and very sweet.

"...Y...Yes..." the boy had answered, hesitant. The fear practically rolled off of him and Pitch luxuriated in the feeling.

"You believe in them, don't you?" 

The boy looked at Jack, but he had only offered Jamie a reassuring smile, a comforting squeeze on the shoulder. He set the boy down and then bent, hands on both sides of Jamie's narrow shoulders as he peeped over at the Guardians, expression mischievous. For a moment, Pitch's faith in him faltered. He wondered at what kind of trick he was playing at- and whether or not Pitch himself was intended to be one of the fools.

But Jamie nodded his head and Jack's smile became warm, affectionate. "Good." he said, ruffling Jamie's hair. "Focus on that, okay? Think about how much they mean to you."

The little boy did and Pitch could see the Guardians give a sigh of relief. The belief from the little boy must've done to them what fear did to Pitch, must've rolled over them like something warm and sure in the sea of shadows and ice they were surrounded by. When Pitch shot a half inquiring, half accusing glare at Jack, he was greeted with the sight of a terrible grimace that had stretched itself over the frost spirit's face. Hatred and vindictiveness had marred the once-gentle smile on his face, had darkened his once-sparkling eyes.

"Do you feel it?" he asked all of them. Jamie and the Guardians all seemed to nod absently, as though the hope, the memory, the wonder that they were getting from him and the protection he felt in turn was a particularly potent drug. The grimace stretched wider, cruler, and even Pitch found himself taking a cautious step away from the lot of them, ready to shield himself from whatever Jack might do.

He gave a breathy, horrible little chuckle.

"Good."

A sickening noise filled the pocket of darkness that they'd been ensconced in. The sound of bone breaking, of a child's cry strangled in the dead of the night, of the sound of frost as it covered the child's mouth and neck, breaking off in chunks as his body hit the ground. The world seemed to go deafeningly quiet as the noises rung around in their ears, as Jack Frost stood up straight and looked at the Guardians.

What little reprieve the child had given them was stolen from their features. But Jack had taken even more from them, had not only eliminated the last link that held their power aloft, but had also eliminated the last of their hope at any sort of quarter. They, the last three of the big four, looked on Jack as though he were one of Pitch's monsters, cringed away from the bite in his laugh when he kicked the body of the child over to them, smiling at the unnatural angle his neck bent at when his head hit the tip of North's boot.

"Jack..." Toothiana began, her mouth agape, her lovely, jewel coloured eyes wide with fear, "Jack...Why?"

Jack turned his head back and forth, as if trying to shake a particularly determined gnat from it. The grimace remained on his face except that now there was a sheen on his face. Icicles, Pitch realized vacantly. He could see the saline build and drip on Jack's cheeks, though the younger spirit never devolved into sobbing. No, these were tears of anger, tears built from the frustration, the loneliness, the pain that Jack had been in the whole of his unnatural life.

"Why?" he asked back, tone acidic. "Why? Hm, let's see... Because I'm selfish?" His pointed his staff at the shrunken figure of Bunnymund, firing a shot of ice that made him skitter against North's leg and cower there. 

"Or maybe it's because I'm not trustworthy?" The second shot hit a little closer to North and Bunnymund this time. The Russian tried to cut the blast with his sword, but to no avail; the ice stuck his knees to the ground and Bunnymund along with them. 

He paused in front of them, knuckles white from clutching his staff. Pitch could, even at his distance, see the tiny tremors that ran through Jack's arms as he stared down the three Guardians.

"Or maybe..." he told them, his voice dropping to a dangerously low tone that Pitch himself had never heard the boy use, not even in their previous discussions of the Guardians, "Maybe it's because you didn't care about me until it was your necks on the line, hm? Maybe it's because all you thought of me as was a nuisance. A trouble maker. Maybe it's because none of you ever stopped to think about anyone but yourselves, your holidays, your special little centers."

They all opened their mouths to say something, to defend themselves, but their tongues couldn't match Jack's speed. Ice crackled and covered their mouths, gagging them against whatever they might say to ease Jack's anger, to persuade the younger spirit otherwise. 

Jack swallowed, looking away from the three of them. 

"I spent hundreds of years doing _everything_ to make people see me. I tried, over and over... And I tried to get your attention. Anybody's attention." At last his voice broke. A tremor of grief shook Jack so violently that Pitch's hand shot out without his meaning to, trying to reach the boy, to steady him. The Guardians and Jack all looked up at him, the knowledge of his presence in the midst of Jack's monologue something of a shock.

But then Jack took ahold of Pitch's hand with one of his own. He pressed his cheek into Pitch's palm, nuzzling the darkened skin there like an affectionate pet. His breaths evened out against Pitch's hand and when he opened his eyes, they were pale with justified fury and hard as the ice that the frost spirit had at his command.

"So you know what? I'm done with waiting for people to pay attention. I'm done waiting for people to see." He told them, stepping away from Pitch's touch. His hands were steady now as he maneuvered his staff towards the Guardians in front of him, his steps smooth as he closed the gap between them further and further.

"I'm going to make them see."

All at once, the air was filled with the noise of ice grinding on shadow, of the sound of Jack's fury manifesting itself in a whirling spout of snow that encompassed the Guardians and the dead boy beside them. The sudden burst of white in the space that had before been completely dark hurt Pitch's eyes and he recoiled. The winds around them whipped and cut into everything, tearing up trees, piercing the veil of shadows, slicing a clean nick into Pitch's cheek.

He made to protest, but his voice was lost in the flurry. It was only when the snow began to settle, when the storm died down, that he could speak. 

The words died on his lips.

There, in front of him, was a pillar of ice that shot heavenwards, as if Jack had made the monument to reach for the moon, itself, made to shove the failures of the Guardians in the man in the moon's face. Certainly, there was no mistaking that it was a monument to their failures- the three former Guardians were swept up inside of it, their bodies contorted into inhumanly fluid movements, but pierced by spikes of ice within the pillar that had run them through. Their faces held expressions of shock, but Pitch could see that the light had gone from their eyes. 

It was beautiful.

Recovering from his shock, but not from his awe, he stepped towards the body that was curled up at the bottom of the monument, the little pale, shaking thing that sobbed into his knees. Slowly, carefully, he pressed his hand again to Jack's face, tilting it upwards ever so gently. With his other hand he gingerly broke off the icicles that had accumulated on Jack's cheeks, making calming little noises as he did so.

"You were wonderful." he told Jack, leading the boy up onto his feet with a great deal of care. He could practically see the instability in his emotions, a great, severing crack through a blanket of ice... He wanted to be careful not to agitate it for concern it might break the rest of Jack too. The praise seemed to calm the younger spirit some, Pitch's smooth voice like a balm to his raw and bleeding heart. "Absolutely perfect, my wonderful little prince."

Jack fell against him, weakened by both emotion and the over-use of his powers. He nuzzled against Pitch's hands, against his chest, his breathing laboured and his eyes closed. "Anything for my king..." he murmured quietly, shivering when Pitch ran a hand through his hair. He pulled back his head a little, looking up at the nightmare king.

"What's next?" he asked.

"For now?" Pitch replied, pressing Jack's head back against his chest gently. "Rest, dear Frost. You've done enough for today."

To his surprise, the younger spirit fell against him fully then, body sagging as sleep overtook him. Though it took a great deal of restraint, Pitch managed to shoo away his nightmares, keeping Jack's sleep unfettered and untroubled as he possibly could. The boy had exceeded all his expectations, all his plans, and he deserved, Pitch had thought, at least one night's rest.

He had sunk back into the shadows, far beneath the earth's surface where the sculpture, the pillar that proved Jack Frost's strength, his reality rested. Pitch had not bothered to change it. The humans would awaken from the nightmares that now flooded their streets to find the monument, to look upon it with wide eyes and open mouths. They would not see the bodies of Santa Clause, of the Easter Bunny, of the Tooth Fairy twisted into it, their features malformed in horror and their bodies riddled with puncture wounds.

They would see only the ice that rose from its roots on the tarmac to the clouds in the sky. The only body they would see would be that of the little boy, of little Jamie, the last Believer, suspended in death by ice that no mortal could break or melt. They would see him, the last symbol of hope, the last one of them who believed that there was still wonder in the world, enclosed within an inescapable, unexplainable horror... 

And they would _fear_.


	2. Chapter 2

Everything had been so easy after that.

Of course, that didn't mean that it wasn't complicated- taking over the world and instilling belief in the masters of fear and frost in every living human was, of course, something that took lots of planning and lots of patience. The thing of it was that almost the moment a command left Pitch's lips, Jack Frost would whip off to see it done. Why, even the nightmares would take lead from Pitch's ally, would follow his orders, knowing that the young frost spirit was practically Pitch's right hand.

Jack, in essence, left Pitch to do the planning and scheming in the peace of his lair. He never questioned, never faltered. Pitch would send him in any direction he pleased, with any order he pleased, and Jack would follow his wishes. He had spread gigantic glaciers across the oceans, shot men in the hearts with arrows made from icicles, all without a second thought. He had driven the hordes of nightmares Pitch left at his disposal through every country on the face of the Earth, leaving no human unafraid, no person feeling safe and secure, not even within their homes.

And all Pitch had to do in turn was to praise him. It took only the tiniest word of thanks towards Jack's efforts for the boy to smile bashfully against his staff, only the smallest stroke of his cheek for Jack to sigh in the most satisfied of ways. Occasionally, when Pitch was feeling especially magnanimous, he would bend and kiss the younger spirit, fond of the way that Jack would sink against him, half-limp in his arms, his deadened heart so warmed and excited by the action that it would beat, ever so slowly, against the boy's ribcage.

Such actions seemed to be the lifeblood of Jack now, seemed to be what kept him from teetering too far over the edge of his own psychosis, and so Pitch didn't mind doling them out to the boy. He didn't even mind when, on the few occasions that he had nothing for Jack to busy himself with, the frost spirit would sit on the floor beside Pitch's chair and lean against his leg, hide his face in the folds of the elder spirit's cloak. The minor inconvenience of it was a pittance for the oil in his plans that Jack proved to be.

On one such night, he had shaken Jack from his reverie beside him, making a soothing noise when the younger spirit rose with a start, a worried expression on his face, as though he may have done something to offend Pitch. 

"Oh, I'm sorry, Jack," Pitch had begun, not really meaning the apology, but nevertheless reaching up to stroke the boy's cheek with the back of his fingers in a soothing motion, "I didn't mean to startle you. It's only that I've got the last of our plans, dear Frost."

Jack pressed his cheek against Pitch's fingertips, heaving a great sigh of relief as he stepped closer. He examined the convoluted maps and diagrams and schedules, but Pitch could see by the tug of his eyebrows and his thoughtful frown that he had absolutely no idea what it all meant. Pitch gave an affectionate chuckle- he knew Jack was cunning, but he always enjoyed knowing that he was the more intelligent of the both of them- and pulled Jack into his lap, causing the boy to shiver and sigh before actually settling in.

"Do you see these coordinates?" Pitch asked him, voice too-sweet. 

"Yes...?"

"These are a list of the places that we're going to wipe clear off of the map."

Jack looked again at the chart, a bit of hesitation apparent in his eyes. "Those are all major cities..." he murmured. Pitch's doting smile quickly turned into a stiff frown.

"And the problem with that is?" he demanded. Jack winced at the venom that had seeped into his tone and Pitch felt almost bad for having let it loose, but... But they were so close, now! Jack had never questioned the killing of humans, had even suggested the most effective means of doing it, ways that would make other humans convinced that they, themselves were responsible for the deaths of their loved ones, make them fear what not heeding the power of ice and darkness properly could do to the people around them... What made him hesitant now?

"...If we kill too many humans, you might lose too much of your power."

There was a moment of silence that stretched between them. 

After he had successfully recruited the young frost spirit away from the Guardians, Pitch had never considered what Jack's fears might be- he didn't need them to coax the boy into doing anything Pitch wanted him to do or to threaten him against things which might be detrimental to the nightmare king's campaign. It wasn't that Pitch was unable to discover Jack's fears- fear was, after all, the thing that Pitch always knew about anyone, regardless of if they were mortal or not- it was just that it had never occurred to him that they might be something he was concerned with. But now he could feel Jack's trepidation, his fear, and at the heart of that fear was something that moved the master of shadow in a way he had not expected: Jack Frost's deepest fear had become that he might lose Pitch in some way. He was used to being forgotten, left to languish in his relative weakness, but he was truly concerned that Pitch would be hurt if he were forced into the same situation once more.

"Oh..." Pitch sighed, stroking Jack's cheek. The boy looked up at him from under his eyelashes, obviously anxious not to incur Pitch's further ire. "Jack... You sweet, stupid boy."

His fingers moved to the nape of Jack's neck, then, ghosting over the sensitive, cold flesh in a way that made the spirit in his lap shiver a little more, his eyes losing focus. He knew as well as Pitch did that the insult had been more of a gentle chastisement than something that Pitch actually thought of him.

"I would never put our power in danger...Not either of us, do you hear me?" 

Jack nodded, eyes fixed on Pitch's mouth as he spoke.

"No, these are all losses that we can afford. We may lose some of our power momentarily and, yes, many will die, but by the end of it, there won't be a human alive who doesn't know that we, and we alone, are their masters."

"...Alright."

"Good, Jack. Very good." Pitch grinned, taking the boy's pale face in his hand and tilting it towards his own. He could feel the warmth of his body battle with the chill of Jack's, but he saw the spark in Jack's eyes when he looked at them, saw how his pupils dilated and his cheeks tried their best to flush. "If you just do what I say for this last act... We'll never have need of another attack ever again. It'll be just you and I, Jack. Ruling together."

He sealed his promise with a kiss. Beneath his own mouth, Jack's was... Well, cold, yes, but also needy, also tender and trembling and so desperate for the warmth, the care that only Pitch seemed able to give him. The frost spirit shifted on top of his lap, leaning further without realizing it, but Pitch steadied him with a sure arm around Jack's waist. When he felt they had lingered long enough, he pulled away from Jack slowly, so as not to startle the boy.

Jack sat there for a few moments, his body still leaning in, his eyelids still shut. For a moment, it seemed as though he had become an ice sculpture, himself, his pale skin completely smooth and still, as if under some sort of enchantment. Very slowly, Jack opened his eyes, blue finding fading gold in the darkness.

"What do I need to do?"

*

Granted, it had taken them a while to realize the full potential that Pitch's plan held, but it was a potential that was realized, nonetheless.

It had been all too easy for Pitch to take up his nightmares and fearlings and to rush the human population. With Jack racing to and fro across the world, leaving not just blankets of ice and momentous sculptures of frost, but the permafrost necessary for famine and the hailstorms necessary for preventing humans from traveling too far, from communicating too easily, it had been all too simple to corner humans in the dark recesses of their minds and bring their fear to the forefront.

He had made certain that they would channel their fears and frustrations into blame, blame placed on other nations, other countries. Each sect of humans believed that there was another that was responsible for this, that there was someone in some far off place that was controlling the weather with great machines manufactured for a war that didn't exist. 

They all pointed their fingers at one another, all buying into hysteria, and Pitch soon found that he did not even need to control the humans with his own army any more. In only a matter of weeks, all countries were preparing for war with the rest of the world. The nations, as he had planned, began to cry out to their leaders to build their ammunitions. 

The leaders, of course, were no more immune to the overwhelming fear and suspicion than any of those below them, and so they began to heed the masses' cry. All the countries began arming themselves with the most impressive, destructive devices they could afford. 

Pitch smiled at the broadcasts demonstrating the nuclear weapons the most.

When he and Jack had finished laying the groundwork, they met again in Pitch's lair. Pitch was excited, feverish with anticipation, but Jack had only stared at the globe that rested in the nightmare king's lair, eyes shining, reflecting all the little spots of dark across the globe. He ran his fingers across the surface, touching the ice that had built up over each dim, flickering speck of darkness. 

"What's next?" he asked, expression thoughtful. "We wait for a war?"

Pitch smiled widely, demonstrating his sharp teeth as he stepped toward both Jack and the globe.

"No, dear Frost, no. Human wars are such long affairs... and they rarely produce so many favourable results. They make people tired of hating each other and wanting to trust again... No, Jack..." Pitch corrected, adding his own hand to the globe's surface. "There will be no war. There will be only panic and chaos and death... And then, us."

Reaching out, he spun the globe, causing it to spin so rapidly that a breeze from it pushed Jack back a little. Pitch crept behind him, covering Jack's eyes with his hands, and he could feel the oxygen starved blood in Jack's cheeks begin to warm, just slightly. 

"You decide where we start, Jack." he chuckled. "Go ahead. Reach out your hand. One..."

Jack held his hand to himself, unsure. Very slowly, it began to unfurl in the direction of the globe.

"Two..." Pitch whispered in Jack's ear. Even the boy's fingertips shivered.

"Three!"

No sooner had Jack's fingers touched the globe than Pitch had shot off, carrying the frost spirit with him. They came to rest in a control center, a strange place with fluorescent lights and large monitors and lots of strange people tapping away on their computers. Pitch watched Jack examine the room, eyes locking on an alarm system in front of him.

"Be a dear, Jack." Pitch told the boy. "And ice that little machine you see up there."

No sooner had Jack touched his staff to the machine than the room had exploded with noise. It was a strange, repetitive, mechanical noise, one that jarred the workers and technicians from their places and sent everybody scrambling. But Pitch reached out to all of them until he found one that he could use, one he could control perfectly.

He flooded the human with fear, with false visions and false words, making them believe that they were only following orders. In a matter of seconds, they had sent off a bomb. Then another. He kept going until the facilities ran out of bombs to send, unworried as to whether or not there were a higher authority that could somehow stop the launches. His nightmares and fearlings had now descended upon the building, and there was not one human who could see reality for themselves until the damage was already done.

"Thank you for your assistance." Pitch laughed at the worker he had manipulated, overjoyed at the swell of true fear that came from them when they realized what was happening. But no sooner had they made to cry out than one of his fearlings had taken ahold of them, blinding them, deafening them to the world around them, manifesting the fear of what they'd done over and over inside their head.

"Jack!" he called, and the younger spirit snapped out of the trance that the chaos of the room around them had created in him. Pitch raised his hand and crooked his finger, beckoning the boy to come over to him. He leapt across the room rather gracefully, landing beside Pitch with a seeming serenity that implied they were not surrounded by a room full of screaming, crying humans and a louder alarm.

"Come with me." 

Pitch smiled wider, grabbing Jack's arm and shooting off once more. When they were out of the building, Pitch hurtled up into the sky, not slowing until they found the missiles they'd launched not minutes before. They streaked alongside of them, two more blurs against the midnight sky. It was only when they began to arc downward that Pitch stopped, staying far above the ground below with a mad smile on his face.

"Here, Jack." Pitch said, draping a protective sort of veil around the both of them. It made Jack's vision impossibly dark and he looked up at Pitch questioningly, though he could not make out the other spirit's features very well. Pitch chuckled. "Turn your head down again. You should see this."

Jack frowned, but turned his head down to look at the city, arms still wrapped around Pitch's neck. He settled his head against the nightmare king's collarbone and waited.

Then it came. There was a wave of light that Jack suspected, had he been without Pitch's veil, would have been very painful for him to experience. Even with the veil, the light was too-bright and dazzlingly immense, surrounding absolutely everything, and Jack realized in a very absent way that Pitch's power must have gotten quite immense, as well, if he was able to protect himself from the sheer brightness of it.

Just as his eyes were adjusting, a deafening roar shook him against Pitch's body and Jack saw only fire and smoke, billowing and cascading from the ground and across the night sky. He felt as though the breath had been knocked out of his lungs and he couldn't recover it. His mouth remained slightly open, awestruck, as Jack surveyed the city beneath them and saw how just one of the bombs had obliterated so much. Everything that hadn't been disintegrated looked as though the blast had swept it back, bent it away, as though the buildings and monuments themselves were trying to escape its force.

In the distance, Jack saw another flash, heard another roar, saw another cloud of fire and smoke fill the night sky. And another...Another...

"Do you see it, Jack?"

The frost spirit hesitated, still dazzled and confused by the magnitude of destruction that was happening around him. Pitch was smiling, he could see in the brief flashes of light that only pierced the veil he'd draped around them a little; his eyes were bright with glee, like his thirst for power was finally being slaked.

"See what?" Jack asked, his voice small and wondering.

"That," Pitch smiled, "Is the dawn of a new age."


	3. Chapter 3

Pitch had sent Jack off after that. He wanted to keep a very watchful eye on the other launch centers, to make certain that his plans were falling into place as they should and that the reactionary measures in each country were being taken; there was no one better qualified to attend to directing his nightmare and fearling hordes in his absence than Jack.

Besides... Pitch still needed to have a conversation that was long overdue.

He shot off towards St.North's former headquarters with the same speed and urgency he'd been using all night. Soon enough, the multiple bombs would raise so much soil and soot into the atmosphere that he'd not be able to have this particular conversation, and it was one that Pitch very much wanted to have. He wanted to talk to the Man in the Moon, but he wanted to be certain to do it from a spot that would stick in the other man's craw. Pitch had sworn, long ago, that he would give Tsar Lunar a nightmare. Now he was going to give it to him, sleeping or not, and the image would be the very last that the Tsar saw before all of his precious dreams were stolen from him in plain sight.

Pitch rose from the darkness of the gigantic globe that North had kept in his toy shop, admiring once more all the thrumming little blackened spots on it, covered in ice. Almost the whole globe was exploding with such protrusions now, and Pitch knew as he looked on that fear and frost would spread through this new world with the virulency and urgency of the bubonic plague. Only this new plague, this new grim, hopelessness would cling to all who lived- Pitch could feel their fear even now, swelling and rising inside of him until he almost screamed with the raw power of it all.

But no, no. This appointment required gracefulness. Serenity. No matter how the fluctuations of chaos in the world around him sang out, he couldn't afford to answer them now. He wanted his last words to Tsar Lunar to be precise and cold. He wanted his tone to be something that Lunar would never be able to forget, not in all his days. Not if he ran from the moon itself, not if he ran for the rest of his existence, would he ever be able to forget the sound of Pitch's voice, victorious, as he closed the curtain on the last of the Tsar's hopes.

And so he stood atop the globe and opened the panel in North's ceiling to allow the moonlight to shine through. He smiled widely, the moonlight- or any moonbeams that Lunar had been planning to send- confident in his knowledge that no amount of light could now over power him. It would take the light that the Pookas had protected to even weaken him in any significant way... And the last of them had now been skewered through, trapped in a pillar of ice for the rest of time!

"Hello, old friend." Pitch greeted with a small bow, mocking pleasure dripping off every syllable, every gesture. He was not expecting a response, but took pleasure in the disapproving, distraught flicker the distant orb gave off.

"Yes, I know! But, of course, by now, you must know, too... Know that your precious little puppets are dead. Dead!" The laugh he offered rang around the room, now cavernous since the Yetis had realized St. North was dead and had abandoned it. "Ah, that feels wonderful to say, dear Lunar."

He smiled, beginning to pace along the top of the globe. The moonlight that shown on him seemed angry, almost. It was an emotion the Tsar had never displayed to him before, but one that he luxuriated in now. How wonderful it was to cause Tsar Lunar himself, the Man in the Moon, the supposed protector of dreams and goodness, his supreme _serenity_ , quake with anger!

"Oh, don't be so put out with me, old friend. It was their own hubris that lead them to their destruction." Pitch chastised, one long finger set to wagging at the moon from a distance. "Besides... That isn't even what I've come to talk to you about. And I don't have to do this, you know, it's more of a..." he searched for the word, rubbing his chin and furrowing his brow in exaggerated consternation, "Well. More of a courtesy. You like those, don't you? Manners? They keep everything so much more pleasant, yes? So much more _calm_."

The moonlight seemed to stand still at that. There were no words, no expressions, Pitch imagined, which could have captured the glee with which he drew that moment of anticipation and curiosity out. There was a sound that filled the room and broke the silence in it, though: the bursting of icy pockets of darkness somewhere more south of the globe, a whole clutch of them at once. Then, little by little, there were others that dropped off in the area around the explosion, random bursts indicating a secondary wave of death. It became more silent, then, but Pitch could just make out the quiet noise of little pips of ice reforming, greater in number, and the nightmare king smiled to himself.

It had been the sound of Jack's guiding hand at work.

"Yes, my colleague has been busy, hasn't he? Nevertheless..." Pitch resisted the urge to slap his knee when the moon's corona expanded and contracted rapidly, angrily, as if Tsar Lunar had made to silently yell at Pitch for all that was happening across those thousands of miles that separated them.

"Oh, come, Lunar, really! You should have known he would join me." The nightmare king mocked, judgemental gaze fixed on the Tsar's bright-shining home. "You can't fish a dead boy's soul out of the lake he died in, keep his memories from him, and leave him without a word or glance for three centuries without expecting some sort of problem!"

There was more anger in those words than he had expected there to have been. It gave Pitch a moment of pause to think on where the outrage that he felt at Jack's treatment had been centered inside of him, highly uncomfortable with the proposition that the boy's emotional welfare was causing him anguish as well, even if it was the barest fraction of it. He shook it off, buried it away. Even if he were one for such introspection, such focus on his own emotions... it could wait.

"Yes, he joined me... And he's out amongst the humans executing my plans so that I can take the time to inform you of something: you've lost, old friend." His smile was again wide, displaying the points on his teeth that glistened wetly in the moonlight. 

"Don't bother protesting. The bombs that dear Frost is taking care to guide right now are going to change this world. Not even your little moon beams will be able to stop it now. The dust, the ash from the bombs...It's going to fill the atmosphere, my darling Tsar Lunar." Another constellation of bursting noises occurred below; Pitch payed no attention to them. "Nothing will be able to shine through unless I part the clouds myself to allow it- not you, not your little moon beams... Not even the sun will pierce the veil of this world against my wishes."

His voice rose, and his body too, and Pitch did not even think of their swelling, of the magnitude to which he was growing. Soon he reached out of North's toy shop and farther, growing larger than the building itself to look up at the moon. It thrummed in worry, in anxiousness, in urgency, and Pitch only fed on that. For the first time, he felt Tsar Lunar's fear, and it nourished his twisted soul in ways no other fear had ever done. 

"All this is mine now, Lunar. The Earth... The humans... _Jack_." he said, reaching up his hand. Shadows and ash swarmed to it, around it, closing in on the appearance of the moon like a shroud. The light of it struggled to break through, moon beams fighting desperately, but it was to no avail. The last ray of light shone on Pitch's face, fixated as the nightmare king's eyes burned through it, consumed it.

"You will not take them from me."

With that, the sky had closed and the moon was never seen again.

*

The world was everything that Pitch had dreamed it would be.

The survivors of the nuclear fallout huddled together in small towns and villages, all fiercely suspicious of each other, let alone of any outsider that happened upon them. There were so many things that people were terrified of in his new and wonderful world. They were afraid of the dark and the cold, of course, rightfully fearful of the masters that ruled over them with an exacting fist made of ice and shadows. But they were also fearful of so many other things, of the dangers of scavenging when so few could make food, of the strange pockets that occasionally appeared in the atmosphere, letting a strong beam of sunshine beat down upon random spots of the earth.

They were cautious of the new plant life and animal life that arose from the conditions, leaving Pitch to chuckle at the attempts made by whatever nature spirit still roamed his and Jack's world to assist the humans in surviving. 

He had not been worried that they would survive; humans, like insects, were remarkably successful at surviving what seemed like impossible odds. They didn't flourish but they survived, propagated. They carved out homes for themselves in the wreckage of the old world. They made new societies with new rules, and there was nothing that Pitch appreciated more than when their rules always included some sort of ward against him or Jack. 

Some burned offerings to them. They slaughtered a range of gifts as sacrifice, from animals to virgins and everything in between. Some took to setting their likenesses in ice sculpture- something that Jack was always entranced and flattered greatly by, though he could have easily made more fantastic sculptures himself with a flick of his wrist- or in wood or stonework or, Pitch's personal favourite, grand paintings that completely covered the outer walls of whatever homes and buildings they possessed. 

He and Jack had walked alongside each other for many years simply exploring their new world, turning over every rock, observing what their human subjects were making of themselves in the vast expanse of destruction the duo had wrought for them. They were always seen. When humans saw them approach, they'd fall to their knees. Some would cry. Some would bow. But all knelt in awe at them, at the power that followed them, and all payed them homage in some way, shape, or form.

Occasionally, they even found ways to entertain their new masters. After seeing Jack walk alongside Pitch so much, some humans came to their own conclusions and had concocted what Pitch suspected were supposed to be wedding gifts: an ornately lacquered necklace of black and blue and gold here, a white sheath gown with delicate patterns of frost crawling up from the hemline there.

Pitch had always laughed at Jack's reaction to such gifts. The way the boy would look on them with a wrinkled nose, deny them, then with react exasperation when they would return and there would be yet another such gift, only more ornate, more beautiful, more delicate, as if the humans were convinced that his reluctance to take the offerings rested in that they were not glorious enough.

Eventually, the young frost spirit caved into the human's insistences and Pitch's teasing and began to wear the garments so that he had to deal with neither. There was an added bonus for Jack, however, that the materials the humans chose to offer up to him were very soft and ethereal- there were times when Pitch would do nothing but stroke the boy's body through his garments, hands exploring the textures against the backdrop of Jack's cold body. He liked best to let their lips brush between the barely-there veils that the boy was now given to wearing, mouths always just shy of a kiss.

Jack's body bent to his touch, sighed at every stroke that Pitch offered through the barrier of his clothing. More than once he had heard the boy give a deep moan of longing, of need, but Pitch could not bring himself to ruin the beauty of Jack's yearning. He would leave the frost spirit to collect himself, allow his eyes to sharpen from the haziness of lust, allow the shaking in his limbs to still.

He would feel Jack sweep up alongside of him, see the delicate snowflakes that fell in the wake of their progenitor fall all around the two of them. Jack grew quieter in those moments, leaving the silence between them much louder than it ever was at any other time. Unspoken words, Pitch knew, lay in Jack's head, but he seemed very determined not to let them out. He only walked alongside Pitch, his features obscured by the gauzy veil and the ornate patterns of frost that clung to it from exposure to the master of frost, himself.

On and on it had gone between them: they would travel, dance around each other. Pitch would hold Jack in his arms and then at arm's length, wanting to hold the boy and apprehensive as to doing anything more, anything that might excite or complicate emotions too much in the boy, causing him to slip and lose his emotional and mental balance. It wasn't a problem, Pitch told himself, because Jack always came back. Yes... Jack Frost always came back.

And then, one day, he didn't.


	4. Chapter 4

Oh, Pitch had tried very hard not to become too concerned with it. He had told himself, many times, that if Jack Frost wanted time to think- or sulk, whichever the case may prove to be- that it was no business of his.

They had, after all, nothing to worry about. There were really no further duties to attend to. The world that they had built together could not be penetrated by any force inside or outside. The guardians were dead, but even had they not been, Pitch could still examine that their bodies trapped within that first monument to Jack's great and terrible wrath. There was not even a reason to mind the humans that worshipped them like gods, for all humans believed in them, now. 

So Pitch travelled without his frostbitten companion, covering the world further in swathes of inky darkness and fear. It helped that, in the years since their great victory, Pitch had grown a grudging sort of affection for the humans that now inhabited the earth, his earth. They were always eager to please him, always eager to gain his favour. Yet, even when he toyed with them, treated them cruelly, plagued them with fear and despair and horrible visions wrought by his trusted steeds, the humans seemed to meekly accept their lot in his plans, always determined that it was a combination of their own faults and Pitch's powerful nature that forced him to inflict such measures on them.

Somehow, though, they had brought about the nurturing side in him- they invoked his name as a ward against the dangers of the world just as often as a curse, if not more. Many times, he would watch a child teeter too close to the cave of some unspoken horror or begin to tread on grounds where the radioactivity was certain to spell death for them, and he would only realize that it was his own hand, his own dark hand, that guided them back with pale paintings of rudimentary fears that sent them tottering back to their villages, to their parents and families... Back to safety.

By no means did he see himself as a new breed of Guardian, of course- he was primarily concerned with himself, then with Jack, the rest of the world be damned- but he had to admit that the bitterness he felt towards humanity had somewhat diminished since they had recognized him as their rightful ruler. Though Pitch would rather have his internal organs cut out and served to him as a meal before he'd admit to it, Jack had been entirely right about the concept of being believed in versus being feared.

Pitch had thought, mistakenly, that being feared would be so much better than being just believed in. As a master of fear, of darkness, of nightmares and shadows and all the strange and creeping terrors that hid within them, he had thought that ruling solely by fear would naturally suit him, that it would sate the loneliness, the bitterness, the contempt that he had for hope and dreams and wonder and all who remembered them and held them within their hearts. It genuinely surprised him that the humans had grown to love him, to respect him, and to genuinely look on him as a saviour from death as well as a tyrant that ruled them with a leaden grip. Their belief and their gratitude towards him fed him better than just fear alone; their submission to all the negative emotions, the darkness that he flooded them with, bolstered his spirit so much that he could never imagine ever running again on such a one-note emotion as common fear.

Still, fear was his domain, and Pitch never stopped getting a kick out of dropping into some random city and filling its inhabitants so full of waking nightmares that screaming and mass panic didn't stop for days afterwards. The snow and ice that dotted the landscape made it easier for Pitch to curl into the cities incognito when he wanted to, made it easy to keep the citizens guessing as to whether or not their madness and paranoia came from reality or from the nightmare king's own hand.

That day, though, was not a day that Pitch had wanted to keep people guessing. Toying with them was fun and he enjoyed being able to mount tension upon tension, letting it brew beneath the surface only to watch the first bubble of panic arise and break the otherwise smooth waters, guiding the whole of the emotional tide in the city to boil and spill over into chaos... But that day had been a day where he had thought on Jack's absence far too keenly, felt the cold breeze by his side whistle vacantly, and so he wanted to be acutely felt, seen, admired, and feared by all he touched. He wanted to press into the dark corners of their minds and to feel their screams press back, all too aware that he had the power to eradicate them and everything they had ever loved with a wave of his hand.

He decided to start small, planning to work his way from the outer rings of familial homes to the heart of the city he'd chosen. That way he could feel the fear spread inwards, a tidal wave of paranoia and darkness crashing towards the heart of the city. He could travel with it, feel his influence swell and take hold, and feed off of all the delicious imagined horrors that arose from the people trapped underneath its metaphorical waters.

The first clutch of houses that he came across housed a handful of people- less than a dozen, all assembled from the ravages of the world, from the cruel realities of family broken by dangers they had not bothered to take heed of. Yet, that was enough, and Pitch entered into the house with a cold and bitter wind that rattled the aged door frames and blew the fire that the family had gotten going for the night to a dim, flickering thing built on gently glowing coals. 

Before their eyes could even adjust, one of the children screamed, immediately running to clutch at her sister. The family, oddly, huddled around her protectively, their heads swiveling and eyes darting about as though they were looking for something, anything, that could indicate what they were up against. Their fears sang out to him: the darkness, what lay within it, the failure to protect, death... Yet, over all the fears that bloomed forth from the youthful group, one overriding fear was that of failing to protect the little girl, of letting her be taken away. 

Even had he not had the gift of being able to see her in the dim lighting of the ramshackle shelter, he could clearly see her features in their heads. Strangely, all of them seemed to be thinking about her eyes... Eyes that looked far too familiar for Pitch to mistake their cast and hue. They were strange and beautiful things: gold that burst from around the pupil and tapered into grey and silver, almost like pale molten metal that had cooled around the edges. 

They were eyes exactly like Pitch's.

It made him curious, that they would fear harm coming to the girl for the similarity. Pitch had travelled the whole of the world many times over since the apocalypse he and Jack had wrought together, and everywhere he went there were people who lauded any similarity that a child might bear to himself or Jack. There were just as many parents, if not more, that were likely to seek out ways to dye their children's hair ever darker shades of black rather than lift colour to make it appear white. There were many parents who searched for ways to ensure their children would be born to have grey-gold eyes like his own. There were even some societies that wore nothing but black and white, the colours of their masters, and who covered their faces with ashes or leaden paint to mimic the grey and white pallours of each master's skin.

Similarities were coveted; the humans seemed to have decided long ago that any marking resembling a trait of their rulers was a mark of favour, a mark that clearly implied the child in question was to be kept close and safe, treated with much care. Yet, it wasn't greed of ownership that drew the family in towards their youngest member, but just the fear of losing her... Of losing her because of the one thing that should have assuaged such panic.

Pitch stepped closer to them, examining their huddled mass. A shiver ran through them now that they could make out his shifting movements, the mass of darkness surrounded by the flurry of snowflakes that blew inside the house through the open, broken doorway. The little girl whimpered again and Pitch caught a few desperate tears hitting the floor, almost making him croon. Young fear bred such potent tears, such delicious misery.

A collective breath was caught in their throats when Pitch stopped just in front of the fire, allowing its flickering, weak light to shine on his features. His lips split in a twisted, sweet smile as he observed them, tongue gliding across the points of his upper teeth. He caused the fire to flare for just a moment, illuminating the writhing masses of various shadow creatures and nightmares that he had brought inside their home with him. They looked at him with ever widening eyes, the realization flickering across their features as they realized who had crossed the threshold.

Pitch almost tripped into the flames in front of him when he heard them give a sigh of relief.

Instead of the fear he had expected, a wave of relief surged from the young family. Some of the younger members let out shaking, quiet laughs that weren't so much noise as they were stutters of breath. Two of the younger siblings joined their little sister in crying, but the tears came from a place of comfort rather than a place of terror. 

It was not that they seemed intent on disrespecting Pitch- quite the opposite. They had fallen on their knees and bowed before him, foreheads touching the ground as their hearts and minds murmured quiet thanks to him. They didn't dare speak above the quietest of whispers, and not one of them considered themselves worth enough to meet his eyes. Pitch wanted to be angry, but it wasn't that they felt a lack of fear or awe or respect for him- simply that he seemed not to be what they feared most. Evidently, his presence was assurance that something more sinister was far away from them, kept at bay by his own appearance, and the gratitude that they felt towards him for acting yet again as a ward overpowered any sort of proper alarm.

_What is the meaning of this?_ he asked himself absently, now more curious than wrathful.

He reached out towards the youngest's bowed head, fingers running through her dark, matted hair. She shivered as her mind unfolded her deepest fears to him: separation from her family, being taken away... And, curiously, a rush of terror as snowflakes drifted across the landscape of her mind. He probed deeper in that thought, coaxing what fear she could possibly have at the snow from her subconscious, expecting to find, perhaps, that her birth parents had perished from exposure or an avalanche or some other malady that was the side effect of Jack's element, the other element which now dominated the lives of the human race.

Instead, all Pitch picked from the littlest girl was a flash of blue eyes, a shard of memory that betrayed an unmistakable, intricate veil that covered them just enough to make them look misty and dead.

Bells of alarm went off in Pitch's mind, his eyes shooting open. There was absolutely no mistaking what he had seen in the youngest's mind, however brief the recollection of the root of her fears was: she had seen, and was terrified by, Jack Frost. 

His shadowy hand stretched into the minds of all the children present, prodding at the tightly concealed corners of memories that they wished to suppress. It was not that he wanted to hurt them or even to frighten them any more than absolutely necessary- their docility and their loyalty to him as their master had, again, touched the soft spot in his blackened, withered heart- but he also couldn't ignore the fresh, insurmountable terror that Jack Frost and his element seemed to instill in all of them. After all... Since when had Jack become known as a kidnapper? Had they started spreading more than just cute little stories about him nipping at people's noses and fingers and toes? Did they now think of him as some savage monster that consumed all he touched?

Pitch found his answer lurking in the mind of one of the middle children, one that shared the youngest's features and hair, but not her eyes. Pitch guided the boy's fears to the surface of his mind as gently as possible, not wanting them to seize up and hide themselves when he needed them to play smoothly and truly for him. He could see that the boy and the youngest girl shared a family once, saw that they had, in fact, had an older sibling, an older brother, who had been in this family grouping with them.

A scene of freshly fallen snow played out in front of Pitch's eyes. It was absolutely angelic looking, sparkling even in the darkness, and the sibling-family had all been taking a break in their struggles to survive to just relax in it, to have a few snowball fights, to build silly make-believe fortresses and igloos. The girl who had seemed the eldest to Pitch looked to be younger, then, by a few years, and a few years younger than the very tall boy that stood next to her. Like his brother and sister, he had dark hair and finely wrought features, but his eyes mirrored the littlest girl's exactly rather than sharing the stone-grey of his brother's.

He and the eldest girl had been talking, watching the others play with a guarding eye. They'd each held a gun in their arms, ready for whatever might try and intrude upon the peace of their day, but they seemed to be less tense, soaking in the contagious feeling of excitement and joy from their collective siblings.

Suddenly, the eldest boy stopped talking altogether. He went quiet and alert, lifting his head and straightening his spine as though he had caught notice of something that eluded the others. He looked around himself as though he were looking for the source of a noise that no one else could hear.

"What is it?" the eldest girl asked, looking worried. She, too, looked about, but could find nothing.

"Don't you hear that?" the eldest boy said. The girl shook her head. 

"Hear what?"

"Stop... Just... Listen."

She did stop. The other children, slowly realizing that all was not right with their eldest siblings, stopped what they were doing and began to listen, too. At first there was nothing for them to hear. Then, slowly, a noise built from behind the ruined buildings that enshrined the hill they'd been playing on. 

It was not the sound of a beast, but one of man. The sound was not humming, but a gentle, melodic noise with no words. It washed over each of them, causing them to all at once stiffen in acute awareness of the paranormal activity that was closing in on them and sigh at the beauty of it. 

Snapping out of their stupor as the sound got uncomfortably close, the two eldest children raised their guns towards the building the melody was drifting out from. They froze, the snow falling on their shoulders more heavily now, and watched as a figure dressed in white rounded the corner.

Jack had apparently seen fit to change his clothes in the years he'd been apart from Pitch or, perhaps, had simply acquired new ones from admiring humans that had sought favour with him. He was not wearing any of the dresses Pitch had been so fond of mocking and admiring all at once, but now wore robes that draped delicately around his thin, pale frame. The train of them swept delicately out behind him, rippling like water over the snowy ground that his feet did not mark. He wore trinkets made of opal and pearl, things that glittered and reflected against his flesh and clothes.

Only the veil was familiar, though the edges were now covered in ice crystals that weighted and kept it in place about his face and body like some exotic lace wrought from glass.

The children froze in their place, all too awe struck by Jack Frost's presence to move. The recognition of who he was flickered on each child's face, but so did confusion- unlike Pitch, who took pleasure in visiting as many human settlements as possible and basking in their worship and terror, Jack had largely remained withdrawn from the world. The children all knew how to worship Pitch, they'd personally seen him many times before and payed him homage, but Jack Frost remained an enigma to them. They couldn't move, couldn't speak, for they were concerned that any action they may take would incur malevolence in Jack's nature.

Jack's song came to an end and he stopped before the children, just a few meters away. He smiled from behind his veil, but it was a smile as changed and pale as the rest of him. Gone was the cheeky grin and the dashing reassurance of Jack, the Guardian of Fun; in its place was a smile wrought from pure ice, as though an invisible saw were cutting the smile into his features, shaping his skin to redistribute in a pleasing, sterile way.

He lifted his index finger and curled it towards the eldest boy, beckoning him to come closer. The boy shivered. His upper body jerked forward, as if compelled to follow Jack's movement, but the eldest girl's hand shot out to his shoulder to keep him in place, to ground him back in reality. 

Pitch could see Jack's smile go tight, his blue eyes narrowing. His features were still pleasing, but somehow terrifying, somehow as inhuman and monstrous as they were beautiful and delicate. His other fingers straightened out to join his index finger, and Pitch watched as a gorgeous, intricate snowflake appeared on Jack's open palm. With his free hand, he lifted his veil just enough to reveal his purple, frost covered lips, and blew gently on the little snowflake in the palm of his hand.

The children all watched, transfixed, as the snowflake danced throughout the air, sparkling and glinting off of the flickering flashlights and lanterns that the children had carried with them. It did magnificent whorls in the air, dancing with the other, smaller snowflakes, enchanting the whole group of children before it floated, gently, down to the eldest boy.

Pitch realized belatedly that Jack had intended for the boy to be the mark all along- the dance that the flake had done and the way it sparkled and shone had all been a diversion, a show, to keep the others from fleeing from it or trying to affect its trajectory. No sooner had it landed on the boy's face than his body rippled with a strange rigidness, as if trying to resist, then went suspiciously lax. He dropped his gun in the snow at his feet and looked towards Jack with half lidded eyes. Not even the steadying hand of his adopted sister could stop him this time, and he shrugged her insistent touch off as he began to work his way towards Jack.

She dared not call out to him. None of them did. They couldn't try and stop their brother as he walked towards their other master, not when the frost spirit seemed so incredibly pleased that the boy had been so easily taken in. Pitch suddenly remembered the strange effect of Jack's snowflakes and felt that, even had his heart been healthy and properly functioning, it would have stopped dead in his chest at the realization he came to.

Jack had done to his enchanted snowflakes what Pitch had done to the Sandman's dream sand: he'd twisted it and perverted its use from something meant to create joy to something that bent others to his will. Jack's snow no longer imbued the afflicted with a sense of fun. Instead, it cast a spell that clouded their judgement and left them to obey only Jack's will.

The boy stopped in front of Jack, only inches away, and Pitch's blood seemed to freeze in his veins. He could not tell if the panic came from his own realizations about Jack's changed nature or the middle child's emotions at the memory, but it was horrifying all the same. The eldest boy's hand rose slowly, mechanically, and he watched his fingers touch the cold gauze of the veil, enraptured. His fingertips closed around the thin material and he lifted it, sliding the fabric that had been resting over Jack's features back and away from them.

Seeing Jack's features unobscured by a veil once more unsettled Pitch somewhat. His power seemed to have changed him some, made his features sharper and more lovely at the same time. He had lost most traces of the rosy hue that once denoted oxygenated blood, instead taking on the appearance of someone part dead, part frost. Only his lips were rosy enough to be called any proper shade of purple, and even they were paled with climbing fractals of ice.

But for all that, his skin and eyes glistened in a glassy, other-worldly sort of way that made Pitch's stomach knot. Jack smiled at the boy, all delicacy, all invitation, and did not resist when the boy's mouth met his own. He wrapped his arms around the boy's neck, deepening the kiss, and the world seemed to go utterly still, despite the flurry of snowflakes still falling.

Time went strange and Pitch did not know how long that the boy and Jack remained locked in their embrace, in their kiss, but it seemed that only minutes had passed before the boy went limp in Jack's arms. The frost spirit pulled away, examining the prone form with no small amount of distress building on his features. His eyes glazed as he choked on something in his throat and Jack dropped the boy with an anguished cry.

The eldest boy rolled down the hill, his figure limp in the snow, unresistant to the tumble that he was taking. He stopped where Pitch was standing, face turned up towards the sky. He did not move as Jack cried out again, did not cry out in pain as the powdery snowflakes transformed into sharp bullets of hail. He only stared up with blank eyes at Pitch's figure, at the heavens, unseeing, unfeeling. Pitch felt a lump stick in his throat as he observed the memory.

The memory self of the boy's younger brother passed through Pitch, numb though the pellets of hail were sure to leave bruises on his skin. He looked over to his eldest adoptive sister, voice barely more than a whisper as he delivered the horrible news.

"He's _dead_."


	5. Chapter 5

There was a renewed urgency in Pitch after seeing the memory that built the family's collective fear of Jack Frost. Pitch didn't want to admit that he was under the command of his own element, but the vision that he had beheld had shown him in no uncertain terms that Jack's distance from Pitch had been enough to drive the young frost spirit over the edge of sanity.

Yet something still prickled at the back of Pitch's mind. When Jack had called the eldest boy to him with his snow, when they had kissed, Jack seemed genuinely distraught that the boy in his arms had perished. Pitch couldn't determine from the memory whether Jack's tantrum afterwards was sparked by grief or frustration, but something deep inside of him told him that, whatever the case, it did not bode well for any living thing. 

Instead of the tide of fear that Pitch had originally intended to sweep the city with, he reached out, targeting any memories or fears that bore Jack's visage or name. He was surprised to find that all those in the city below spoke of him in hushed tones, all so truly afraid that uttering his name would bring him to them that they had merely taken to referring to him as the Consort, instead. At first, Pitch had almost grinned at the name, at the perceived misunderstanding of their relationship- the thought of Jack being his docile little spouse was just as entertaining to him as the insistence of the humans that he take to wearing lace and silk.

Pitch's amusement, however, was short lived. He had found that when the humans spoke of Jack as a consort, they did not mean to label him as married to the night, to fear. He saw, in their minds, that even in the long decades that had stretched since the dawn of their new era, the humans still associated Jack with the damnation of the world long since past.

In their collective mentality, he was the creature whose hands guided missiles of dreadful power. In their eyes, it had been Jack Frost who had led the masses of shadows and fearlings and frost across the expanse of the world, darkening every square centimeter of it before coating it with breath stealing chill. To them, to the humans, Pitch Black was a ruler, indeed- but it was Jack Frost who served to exact imperial justice and royal will upon any nonbeliever.

To them, Pitch was a king. Jack, however, remained their judge, jury, and executioner.

Suddenly, the pieces of how the humans reacted to him began to fit into place. Before, when he had travelled with Jack by his side, the humans had taken it upon themselves to make certain that there was nothing amiss, nothing that they were doing that might upset either Pitch or Jack. They expected that any sort of noncompliance, anything that might cause Pitch to grow displeased with them, would bring about Jack's wrath. Though Pitch terrorized them, he left only the very unfortunate or very stupid gravely injured. Jack, however, executed merciless acts in Pitch's name, by his word, spilling blood and taking life as it pleased the elder of the two spirits.

When Jack had left, however, the humans had begun to lavish Pitch with attention, with love and admiration. They were always glad to see him, even if mass panic was in store, even if he intended to destroy their cities with his own brand of entertainment. They were simply happy for his presence because they erroneously thought that if Pitch were amongst them without Jack, then there could be no danger of punishment from the frost spirit who had almost single handedly killed over half of the human race in the space of a week.

They called him the Consort because they believed him married not to Pitch, but to death, itself.

Ergo, all of this meant that the humans considered Pitch to be their protector. He was, in their eyes, all that stood between them and Jack, them and death. To them, it was Pitch who stayed Jack's hand, it was Pitch whose presence now served as a reassurance that they'd not meet with anything so terrible that they wouldn't survive. Pitch, the king of nightmares, had become the thing that made it easy for the human race to find peace, even in the terrible, eternal night that was their new world. The irony of the situation did not escape Pitch.

He, however, had little time to worry about irony. Pitch was far too busy trying to suss out any sort of history he could from the collective memories of those who dwelled in the city. It was one of the larger settlements that existed after the apocalypse, so Pitch had a nearly overwhelming amount of fears and memories to sort through. It turned out to be helpful, though, when the inundation was able to provide him with a rough story line of Jack's presence in the city. 

As far as Pitch could tell, the denizens of the ruined world had only started speaking of Jack in whispers a few decades back, right after Pitch and the younger frost spirit had split. They had heard rumors from travelers of their second ruler becoming unhinged, no longer bound solely to the influence of the nightmare king. Whispers of people- women, men, adults, children, anything in between or outside of- being led to their doom by a beautiful, cruel spirit of the snow who sucked the breath from their lungs. Stories of bodies never recovered, of family members lost, of the unimaginable horror that Jack Frost had become.

Pitch sought out further memories of Jack, of him appearing to people, but of course, it was difficult- those who had actually had encounters with Jack Frost, himself, seemed to be long since dead or spirited away, and the terror from others that came with discovery of their missing family members and friends was deliciously potent, but incredibly unilluminating as to the new history that Jack had forged for himself. Pitch pressed onward, though, leaving no mind unturned, no memory of Jack untapped, until he finally found something that showed promise.

It was, again, in the mind of a child, though this one could ostensibly bear the dubious title of 'young adult'. If time hadn't aged her, then fear most certainly had.

The scent of pine stung into Pitch's nose as he let her memory wrap around him. It was not that there were any that survived around the city, but there had been a few nurseries after the apocalypse that remained healthy. They were tiny patches of the old world, of old plants, that seemed eerily resistant to any sort of change or sickness, and so it was here that humans seemed to find the most comfort. 

To Pitch, the nursery full of overgrown pitch pines and winding vines and long grasses was as the old world had always been: changeable, fickle, useless. Forgettable. But the memory imbued in him the sense that something had disturbed the normally calm atmosphere of such a place. A quiet tremor of terror caught his attention, and he moved forward to see the girl's memory self crouched behind one of the thicker tree trunks, her black eyes wide and a tiny, trembling hand clasped over her mouth. 

There was the sound of rustling just ahead, something that Pitch imagined made the girl's memory so potent, so horrible. He stepped forward to look around the bend of the tree, shuddering as he passed through the girl's body. It had been a long time since Pitch had been run through by a non-believer, but that didn't mean that the similar sensation felt pleasant or ceased to remind him of emotional aches long since passed.

He focused on the noise ahead, shaking the remembered sensation from his mind. Pitch didn't have to try very hard- what was before him, what the girl's memory held, made every coherent thought fly from his mind, made him reel back and try to find purchase on the dry wood of the tree trunk behind him, made his eyes go wide and his mouth run bone dry. There was a sort of blinding haze that ran through his mind, but a moan cut through it, bringing one, singular word to the forefront of Pitch's consciousness:

_No._

Before him, a young man held his lover against the base of one of the pines, holding no concern for the way the bark was sure to dig into the flesh of their back. In fact, he seemed to hold no concern for anything, his eyes half lidded, misty, an exact replica of the expression that Jack's snowflake had imbued on the boy he'd kissed before. His limbs moved just as mechanically, but when he moaned the sound was real and raw and utterly consumed with pleasure, enraptured in the grip of whatever it was that had changed him so. 

Pitch's eyes followed the faint patterns of frost that curled across sweat-soaked skin, right up to the fingers that left them there. A pair of white thighs trembled as they pressed into the boy's hips, rocking the dark haired boy closer and closer. Another moan tore through the air, but this time, it belonged to someone else.

Jack Frost arched his back against the trunk of the pine tree, expression pained but pleased. It occurred to Pitch that, if Jack had been able to so easily kill the boy he'd seen in the other memory, then such intimate contact must have taken an extreme amount of self control. It made him uncomfortable to imagine how Jack had come about it. He didn't care to think on how many humans Jack had taken to try and perfect such a skill.

He watched- in a detached way, for there was certainly no way that he could allow himself to engage his emotions in this scene- as the pair of them grew more and more restless. They moved faster together, Jack's moans turning into keens and kisses, his nails biting into the flesh of the boy's skin as he was fucked harder and harder against the tree. Pitch saw how Jack's control began to slip. With the growing urgency of his moans came thicker trails of frost against the other boy's back, not just laying patterns of frost, but of ice. His skin began to react, turning blue and purple, though Jack seemed not to notice. 

He didn't notice the changes in the boy's body, or how he began to shake, or the way he began to shut down entirely. The only thing that kept him moving, that kept him from giving in to his body's natural reaction to such extreme chill was the fact that Jack's snow had evidently caused him to lose track of his limitations. When he began to slow down his movements, literally incapable of moving faster, Jack responded by thrusting his hips up closer, faster, making up for the change in the boy's pace without stopping to think what had caused it.

Still unable to look away, Pitch watched as Jack coiled himself more tightly around the boy, his face now pressed against black hair, his eyes screwed shut in pleasure. He reached down between their bodies and touched himself, still impaled on the other boy's cock, his thighs trembling harder and harder with the effort of restraining himself.

It was then that he saw Jack come entirely undone. He screamed against the boy's neck, body arching backwards once more, even as his hips pushed again and again between his hand and against the member buried deep inside of him. His blood no longer seemed to flow, but his chest and cheeks and throat shone bluer than the rest of his skin, giving him the lovely look of something made of smoothly cut crystal. 

He shook, resting his head against the roots of the pitch pine he'd been pressed up against, his chest rising and falling rapidly, though he did not specifically need air. Jack lay there for a few moments before his eyes slid open and he moved to disengage himself from the boy who'd been pleasuring him. The boy did not move, his body rigid and stuck in the arc it had been in when Jack had come. When Jack had come, he'd lost control of his nature. The boy was frozen solid, unable to resist Jack's touch or to respond to the instinct to flee from deadly cold.

Pitch expected an outburst from Jack like the one he'd seen before, in the first memory. He expected hail, cries of anguish. Certainly, he at least expected Jack to look at the boy's dead form with something more conflicted than the look of pale, resigned pity that actually crossed it. 

He did not expect to see Jack so calm about having literally fucked a human being to death, to have snuffed out a human life in pursuit of pleasure. He did not expect Jack's expression to shift to one of seeming contentment as he stood and walked around the boy's body, examining it from all sides admiringly, as though he had created a particularly successful sculpture.

Least of all did Pitch expect to see Jack get back down on his knees and kiss the boy's frozen mouth.


	6. Chapter 6

On and on such memories went.

With every new piece of information, Pitch saw more and more clearly that the years Jack had spent apart from him had transformed him into something different. Every new memory led Pitch closer and closer to where Jack was currently, led him to see how the colour leached itself not just from the boy's skin, but from his eyes and clothes. Before his eyes, Jack grew in to something that was beyond and below humans both; he became the monstrous god that the humans imagined he was.

It was with an almost disgusted fascination that Pitch watched the memories play before him. To say there were no traces of the Guardian of Fun in what Jack had now become would have been completely false- they were there, even if they were covered in thick layers of accumulated emotional grime. The way Jack interacted with his human victims was almost like he intended it as a game. He would find little ways to draw them into his fold, to keep them still for the target of his snow to be hit.

The episode with the first boy- or, at least, Pitch hoped he was the first, though somehow his gut told him that he was being a little too hopeful- was just the beginning of it. Making the snow flake dance to keep the group of children still had been obscenely thoughtful, yes... But Pitch saw that Jack had so many more tricks up his sleeve. A girl with grey-gold eyes and a lovely, long face was lured in by a tiny, delicate looking faun made of snow. When she reached out to pet it, it burst, the enchanted snow covering her from crown to sole. A man with black hair and ashen-tinted skin was ensnared when Jack created a thicket of delicate smelling sculptures that looked like anemones- the moment he breathed in, he inhaled enchanted snow instead of pollen.

Each new method of entrapment was just as fanciful as the last, each showing a level of thought and observation that unnerved Pitch greatly. It would have been one thing if Jack had simply grown to see the humans as his slaves or toys, each one no more deserving of life than as an object of his pleasure, to be played with and disposed of at the slightest whim. It was another thing entirely, however, to think that Jack had actually spent so much effort and time getting to know his victims, just so that he could use their objects of affection to lure them to their demise. 

Pitch couldn't quite put a finger on why the change disquieted him so much. It wasn't as though human life were particularly sacred to him, even if he had gained a grudging sort of affection for it in the decades and centuries that followed the apocalypse. No, it was something about the idea of Jack planning something with a great deal of forethought and executing it with a greater deal of precision. Such points had always been Pitch's area of expertise, with Jack only following orders because he was swift and eager to please.

Still, Pitch asked himself, why was it something he feared? Certainly he had to be equal in power to Jack, didn't he? The whole world was carpeted by snow, yes, but wasn't it painted with shadows? The humans all believed in Jack, but they worshipped Pitch with a fervour he hadn't witnessed since the Templars swept through foreign lands in days long since passed. Why, then, did Jack's sudden autonomy frighten him so?

Even now, the boy seemed considerate of Pitch's position, his power. Though he took in an amount of humans that would be staggering to mortal minds to imagine, it was actually quite fewer than his element had ever done before they'd reshaped the world together. Though every death was intentional, they were spaced far enough apart, over the years, so that Pitch would never feel the sting of losing a believer too keenly.

Something inside of him stirred at that thought.

That was it! That was the thing that disturbed him so greatly about the ordeal. Pitch had seen things more horrible than what Jack was doing, had witnessed the great power Jack had to kill first hand many years before, but... But his attempts had never been concealed from Pitch. No, Pitch had witnessed and known about the great and little murders and intrigues Jack had accomplished over the years. Yet, never once had Jack tried to hide his efforts or his accomplishments in the realm of inventive, well executed, merciless plots. 

Now, though, he was spacing out the deaths so that Pitch would hardly take notice of them. If he had not been triggered by the great fear that the children had had of Jack, he wouldn't have probed deeply enough to uncover the string of horrible deaths that Jack had exacted over the years. Jack, Pitch now realized, had been calculating everything so that it would slip just beneath Pitch's notice. 

If that was true, then it made sense that Pitch should be wary of it. Jack avoiding Pitch just to capture those bearing marks of similarity, marks that were supposed to make such people sacred to Pitch, protected and favoured by him, and send them off to their frigid deaths was bad enough, but working so hard to hide it from Pitch was strong cause for alarm. 

So Pitch had shot off all across the globe, searching for anything and anyone that might lead him to Jack Frost.

The memories and fears of the humans led him to many strange places, for Jack seemed to be fond of spots that were meaningful only to his memories as a human, whether he realized it or not. He took his victims in not just the nurseries that housed the sort of trees he would have spent his childhood around, but in other sentimental places: a church with a cracked altar, where he took a beautiful woman with black hair and deep set eyes; the ruins of a child's nursery, where a small boy with sharp teeth and grey eyes died asleep in Jack's arms; on the surface of a well-frozen lake, when he twisted and moaned between a married couple, both ensnared by his tricks, one pale, one dark.

None of these places, however, brought him to Jack. For many years, Pitch went on this way, searching through the dregs of memories half-buried and fears deep-rooted, every beginning leading him only to a dead end, to a place where Jack Frost would not- or perhaps could not- return to. There were not even bodies to collect, indicators that might show how recently Jack had been in a certain place. 

He had gotten more careful, Pitch had decided, for though he could not ever seem to pinpoint a specific spot or time as Jack was there, the memories and fears being built on his presence continued to mount. There was no one who saw him as he did his deeds now, but there were plenty of people who saw their loved ones as they would wander, eyes half lidded, into the ruins of a city or the veil of a snow storm, never to be seen again. Jack was taunting Pitch, aware of his alarm and disapproval and choosing to ignore it. He knew Pitch searched for him ardently, but stubbornly refused to let himself be caught or found out.

But Pitch had not lost any of his cunning, even in the lull that had come over the world in the absence of the Guardians and Tsar Lunar. Even if Jack was determined to be frustrating to him, he was determined to discover where the boy was hiding, to track him down and have a very lengthy examination of their relationship. He was prepared, if need be, to remind Jack of exactly which one of them was the most powerful and the most intelligent and that it would be a very grave mistake indeed to forget such things.

He had posted fearlings to scan every city, every dwelling, but these were merely distractions. Fearlings were, by definition, mischievous and somewhat indiscreet and, therefore, could never be trusted to remain undetected by Jack Frost. No, the fearlings were to flit about, searching for Jack, but completely obvious to the spirit should he come upon them. They would be easy enough for Jack to avoid, but not easy enough to avoid that Pitch's intention for them to be seen would be obvious.

Yes, Jack would make a game out of the fearlings' presence. Pitch knew that the boy, even if his mind were irreparably broken, would still see the challenge and find it funny, find entertainment within it. He would be so pleased with himself that another presence would go unnoticed. 

The streets that Jack would walk on, indeed, the streets of every town or village, were now dusted with fragments of black dream sand. Nearly imperceptible, even on ground level, the grains were stuck in the broken tarmac and eroded snow, over buildings and on lamp posts. If even a single grain of it were to touch Jack's skin, his clothes...Anything, really, it would result in Pitch being able to track him to where ever it was that Jack had holed himself away.

But even that wasn't the actual genius of it. The sand had been clever, yes, but Jack was also observant. After working so closely with the fearlings and nightmares, he was also very sensitized to Pitch's presence, and might notice the twisted dream sand and avoid the cities altogether. 

Yet, his victims could not.

Even if Jack's will and shrewdness allowed him to stay out of the reaches of the civilizations where the fearlings and dream sand awaited, he would still draw the human that was to become his victim out from them. The victim, already impaired by their mortality and by Jack's enchanted snow, would never notice all the grains of infected dream sand that clung to them. Jack would assume that whatever of Pitch's influence lingered over the human was a direct cause of his coming from the dwelling that was infected by fearlings and think nothing more of it. He would have the human spirited away and lead Pitch right to his own hideaway before anything could be done.

So Pitch had planned the culmination of their little game of hide and seek, and so it went.

He found himself stretched across miles that led to nowhere but frozen tundra and shelves of ice that held no colour or softness. Only the snow that fell on their crags and faults was soft, trying desperately to cling to Pitch, unable to realize that they'd never be able to stick to a shadow. Still, he pressed onward through it all, across it all, paying no heed to the fact that, despite being cloaked in shadows, this was clearly Jack's domain.

The power of the twisted dream sand called out to him from Jack's home, drawing Pitch towards it as if it were a magnet. He only paused in pursuit of it when he came upon something that he had not seen in centuries, something that still took his breath away, something that he could not believe he'd been led to. 

The monument he and Jack had made, together.

It almost made sense, Pitch thought absently, that Jack would come back to it. It was here, so many years ago, that he and Pitch had had the first of many conversations, real conversations, where emotions, not just barbed insults and threats designed to keep each other at arm's length, were exchanged. It was here that Pitch had opened his heart to Jack, truly, and here that Jack had opened his own, in turn, despite himself. Jack had returned, consciously or not, to a place that symbolized his and Pitch's union, their everlasting bond. After all, Pitch grinned bitterly to himself, there truly was nothing that went together better than the two of them.

Hand trailing along the side of it, Pitch braced himself to press onward. The monument of cold and dark, of ice and shadow, was a good sign: if Jack had decided to base his home so close to a reminder that he and Pitch were forever intertwined, then perhaps there was still a part of him, deep down, that could be reasoned with. A part of him that could be reminded of their partnership rather than of Pitch's sheer power. Honey and flies, Pitch thought to himself with a small chuckle.

But the expression, the smile and the chuckle and any other dregs of mirth, was ripped from Pitch's face when the snow storm broke a few miles further. Before him towered a palace, sculpted from ice, that floated out amongst the rough waves of the sea, completely inaccessible by any current mortal means. He watched it for a long time with a wary eye, suspicious of being drawn to a place of such magnitude. 

Jack had never expressed a taste for grandeur, not so long as Pitch had known him. The finery that he wore was almost always made by humans- Pitch had occasionally made the boy presents of clothing when they had first joined forces, including a black cloak marked with threads spun from dream sand so that the nightmares would always know where their leader's ally was, but they had proven too warm to be comfortable and so he had stopped wearing them long, long ago- who were eager to dress the young frost spirit that they deigned a god in only the most intricate silks and delicate lace they had to offer, regardless of what Jack's actual tastes were. Other than that, the boy had always only travelled with what he thought appropriate: his staff- though the object was not needed and had not been for a great many years now- and his snow storms. 

Why, when he and Pitch had first joined forces and Pitch had offered his own abode to serve Jack's uses, the boy hadn't even asked for a room! He had simply found a cage large enough to hold him and curled up inside of it, completely oblivious as to why such an action caused Pitch to fall into a fit of laughter. That Jack only began to wear shoes after decades of Pitch's cajoling and insistence, stating they were too much of a "useless indulgence" since the snow didn't affect him and he didn't mind dirt, served to further underline his deeply ingrained avoidance of luxury.

What purpose, then, did such architecture serve? If Jack, by his very nature, was unaccustomed and- frankly- ignorant of opulence, then to whose benefit was the palace he had constructed for himself? 

Pitch asked himself these questions, studying the delicate spires and arched windows through narrowed eyes. 

When he was certain there was nothing to be done about having to enter, no way that he could conceivably draw Jack out without risking yet another complication in their already over-played game of cat and mouse, he summoned his most loyal, strongest nightmare and rode across the waves to the threshold of Jack's home.


	7. Chapter 7

The entrance to the palace was suspiciously unguarded.

Had Pitch been given to settling in a fixed location- and he was not, as evidenced by the fact that the portal to his lair could be moved about at a snap from his fingers to accommodate his travels- he would have invested time in protecting his home with more than simple distance and snow flurries. Jack didn't have the ability to utilize living things like Pitch did- while he could enchant humans, they would not survive as easily or fight half as well as Pitch's fearlings and nightmares. It surprised him, then, that there were no traps or locks or gates or even difficult to traverse grounds. No, Jack had left his home completely vulnerable to anyone who could cross the sea and storms to reach it.

Then again, if Pitch were the only being that could conceivably achieve such a feat, then it was sensible that Jack had come to the conclusion that it wasn't worth defending. If Pitch wanted to obtain access to Jack's home, he would- traps and tricks and silly little mind games be damned. 

Shaking these thoughts from his head, he pressed his hand to the door and pushed it open, issuing an order to Onyx, his nightmare, to stay outside. It was one thing entirely to enter Jack's home and another to bring in his pets. Pitch didn't have many ideas in the way of respect for beings other than himself, but the common courtesy of leaving weapons outside- or, at least, as much as he could, being that he was one- , at least where Jack was concerned, was one of them.

The room that he entered was, as he expected, made entirely of ice. It was not, however, any less grand for it- benches that could have easily been taken from a baroque salon and pillars resembling the ones that Pitch had stood in the shadows of in ancient Rome dotted the room, seemingly sculpted from crystal that only Pitch's mind could remind him was ice. The room itself was large and circular, with two stair cases descending from a balcony that Pitch assumed led to the next level of rooms.

Between the two staircases was something that touched Pitch in a way that he couldn't quite explain: the statue of a very nondescript human figure dressed in the clothes that Pitch had once fashioned for Jack. Moving closer, he could see that the threads of infected dream sand had been carefully pulled out of each garment, replaced with delicate strands of ice so as not to disturb the integrity of the garments themselves.

He sighed and sagged a bit against the wall nearby, fingers trailing along the ice blocks that made it up as though they would soothe the wretched ache inside of him. His fingers found purchase on grooves in the ice, leading Pitch to realize that Jack had taken the time to carve little designs in the gigantic blocks, as if he were making wallpaper to cover his new home. 

They were sweet patterns that Pitch had not expected to see in such a place, let alone that he expected Jack to have taken the time and effort to carve out himself: delicately carved white tulips, carved in so much detail, right down to the veins in their petals; bushels of hydrangea blossoms that had been carved together in clusters. Pitch had not expected that Jack would grow so sentimental for the easily destroyed symptoms of the old world, but somehow it all seemed to fit into place when he thought about it. Jack had used to use his patterns of frost in the form of climbing ferns and tangling vines... Wouldn't it make sense, then, that given the time and the boredom, he'd learn to create something more fantastic? Wouldn't it make sense that a tamed Jack Frost would give up his wild weeds in favour of something more refined?

What Pitch couldn't account for was the colours in some of them. Rather than just the crystalline blues and transparent, glassy tones, there were some flower etchings that were coloured in creams or blacks or greys or golds, sometimes punctuated by pale, rosy dots of pink or plummy purples or- very rarely- long, fire-like waves of blistering blue-white that seemed to run through completely different patches like a current.

His eyes scanned the room, taking a moment to appreciate the soft tones that surrounded him, to appreciate all the care with which Jack had crafted. Yet, he couldn't help but continue to wonder at the colour. Colour did not bring any amount of joy or fun to Pitch's life- at least, not on a personal basis, even if he could appreciate the craftsmanship of the colours that now surrounded him- and so he could not imagine that Jack had concocted this room specifically to enchant the viewer.

He squinted, trying to focus on the placements of the colour: the long stretches of creme, the tiny dots of purple and rose. The tops of the walls where the etchings were seemed covered with frost, as if to hide the sources of colour beneath the surface, away from the eyes of the viewer. Pitch frowned, a sense of foreboding creeping into his bones, though he did not know from where it came.

Covering his hand and arm with the sleeve of his robe, he reached out and wiped some of the frost away from the surface of the walls, careful not to leave any inside of the thickets of flowers that graced them. He wiped away a wide swath of frost and then, standing back, looked at it again. 

If he had been a lesser being, a being that could not withhold the expression of fears realized, he might have screamed.

The wall he stared at stared back at him with dead eyes and a listless expression, unable to break free of the prison of Jack's embrace. But Pitch was not staring at any sort of sculpture- he was staring at a human corpse trapped inside of the block of ice he'd defrosted, a corpse that was what provided the colour for all of Jack's little etchings. 

Pitch felt himself draw in a sharp breath. He blasted the walls with twisted dream sand, using it as a sort of rudimentary buffing agent, wiping away all the frost that remained on the walls and pillars and floors. Everywhere, everywhere there were bodies. The entire room was filled with them, from the ceiling to the steps of the stair case to the floor, bodies of the victims that Jack had absconded with over the years. He had lay them all to rest here, in his palace, to serve as nothing more than ink for his personal version of wall paper.

He found himself walking up the stairs at a harried pace, blasting everything along his way- every column, every floor, every arch way, every wall, every sculpture- trying desperately to find some sort of point where the bodies tapered off, where, perhaps, Jack had stopped his morbid collection and simply built from ice and snow. But no, there were so many, everywhere, and with each passing step, with each movement closer to the heart of Jack's palace, the colouration of the bodies became more specific.

By the time Pitch had reached the fourth floor, the collective colour palette of the bodies had grown so similar to his own appearance that there was no way Pitch could fight off the hair that stood on end at the back of his neck or the hyper-awareness that made every shifting crackle of ice seem like a death trap lying in wait. All around him were long faces and high cheek bones, black hair and narrow, grey eyes, their bodies supine and naked and covered in ice etchings of budding lime blossoms and clutches of open faced morning glories, completely at the mercy of whosoever looked upon them.

Bracing himself, Pitch focused all his energy on the thrumming traces of his tainted dream sand calling out to him, leading him to Jack. The tendrils of energy reaching out to him were so much less disturbing than the sculptures made from human flesh, the arms that reached outwards to him, eyes unseeing in the bodies attached.

Yet, when Pitch reached the threshold to the room from which the energy emanated, he could not ignore the corpses that stood before him.

They stood four in number, two on either side of the door, all tall and proud in their stances, their eyes exact replicas of the ones Pitch possessed. They could have very well been Pitch, all in different iterations: female, dark skinned, light skinned, long haired. They all looked out at him contemptuously, smugly, as though they mocked him for not being them, as though he were something lesser. He recognized that it was an expression Jack had commented upon often when they were being particularly sharp tongued with one another. It disturbed him that Jack could have recreated it on others so accurately.

He couldn't bear to focus on them, to be presented with such clear distillations of himself that Jack had rendered from others, and so he focused, instead, on the door. His gaze could have melted through the damn thing if it were tangible, but it was probably best that that wasn't the case. The whole of it was taken up by a woman numerous coils of hair that swelled and branched away from her in every direction, leaving the door mostly a thicket of hair and flesh with only tiny shards of clear ice apparent.

At first, he was slightly worried that the door was a solid piece, something he would have to find a way to lift without the help of a crank or lever that was certain to operate it from within. When he approached it, though, he could just barely make out the tiny seam that cut it into two halves and he felt relief and nausea both.

Jack had placed the woman's body dead-center in the door. When Pitch opened one half, the woman's bisected innards stared out at him from it, alarmingly and angrily red.

But he had no time to focus on that. The scent of sex stung in his nostrils as he entered the room and the sound of soft, wet sounds filled his ears, causing him to inadvertently search for the source. 

Jack's bedroom was large, but mostly barren. A window was cut into the far wall of the room, allowing Pitch to see the waves that crested and crashed in the distance, to see the thick clouds of ash that rolled across the sky. There were no bodies in the ice that the room was built from, no sculptures made of human flesh, but there were nondescript statues carved out of ice resembling the one on the first floor, all bearing clothes and jewels that Jack had received as tributes or gifts. 

Pitch's eyes sensed movement and so focused on a large, oblong chunk of ice. It's surface was smoothed into a mirror finish, reflecting the rest of the room, and it was there that Pitch saw the first piece of furniture not made from ice or human bodies.

It was a bed.

Of all the things that Jack had made of ice, it struck Pitch in an odd way to think that the young frost spirit would choose a bed to remain so grounded in the human world. Surely, something made of his own element must be far more comfortable and comforting to sleep on. The bed was, in fact, not even made as a normal bed, from clean cut beams of wood or welded bars of metal- it was made of long, thin birch trees bound together, white trunks and green leaves dotted with frost just enough to make them unable to spoil or wilt. 

From the boughs hung a curtain that Pitch suspected had been one of Jack's longer veils. It was a gauzy, whitish thing that was dotted with crystals and embroidered with beads of black and blue and white. Pretty enough, but hardly any protection at all against prying eyes, serving as less of a blind and more as a hazy membrane that seemed to scatter the beauty of its wearer, make their face difficult to focus on and blooming with pale softness.

It was through this translucent shroud that Pitch saw Jack Frost.

And his lover.

They took no notice of him at first, and though Pitch knew that the man must be enchanted, he had never seen a victim kiss Jack with such fervour... Nor had he ever seen Jack kiss one back with a passion to match it. Their mouths met and it was a grinding sort of heat between them, teeth clicking together in a way that made Pitch's own jaw ache and his tongue go numb and stupid.

He could see the way the man's hands- dyed grey and mottled with black in the way Pitch had seen so many of his worshippers done- stretch out over the small of Jack's back. His palms and fingers were narrow but long, so long, and the nails that dug into Jack's pale skin were sharp and jagged. They would have left angry lines had there been hot blood to fill the abused skin, but for the moment had only left raised white skin that seemed like premature scars.

Jack's own fingers twisted in the man's black hair as he pulled forward for another kiss. It was as if he couldn't get close enough, as if he wanted to consume the man whole right then and there, but felt he had to restrain himself. His thighs were already set around the man's hips, muscles so tightly contracted with the effort of restraint that Pitch could see the tell-tale shaking in them. He brought down one of his own hands to brace against one of his thighs, blunt fingernails marking his own flesh as he guided his lover's mouth to his neck.

" _Ah_!" Jack exclaimed, as if he were shocked when the man's knuckles dusted against his spine, pressing into the flesh that surrounded the delicate column of bone and nerve endings. He pulled back and gazed at the man, wide eyed, expression of shock apparent before his face split into a wicked grin. 

Evidently, even under the influence of Jack's enchanted snow, a human could still retain some of their autonomy. Pitch realized, vacantly, that the man in Jack's arms must have not only been willing to allow Jack to use him, but eager. He realized that all of them, all those humans, all those bodies, must've been the same. Jack had been able to kill them because...Because they wanted him. _Badly_.

Pitch could feel his features darken as an unbidden spring of possessiveness bubbled in his chest.

Shadows convulsed on the floor and wall beside him and Jack paused, for a moment, kissing his lover's lips softly before even bothering to turn his head around and look. He lifted the veil just a bit, just enough to peep out at Pitch, though the gesture in and of itself was mocking, as there was no way that Jack could have missed him through their flimsy divider. Their eyes met and a smile of obscene serenity curled over his lips.

"Oh," he said in a very airy way that suggested Pitch did not look the picture of fury and malice, "It's just you."

With that, he lowered the veil once more, smiling and whispering something in the ear of the human who shared his bed. The human smiled, then, too, though it was a distant and dreamy sort of expression and Pitch doubted very much that he realized there was anyone else in the room besides himself and Jack at all. 

Their mouths connected once more, slow and soft and burning against one another, as Jack placed his hand on the human's chest and pushed him back against the downy pillows that were piled on the bed. When the human reached his hands up to Jack, Jack took them in his own, lacing their fingers together, and used them as a balance as he leaned down to kiss the man again.

Leaning back up, Jack began to move his hips at a slow pace, garnering a moan from both himself and the man beneath him. Pitch realized that his entrance into the room had not been the beginning of their coitus, but that they had been well into it when he arrived. It was only now that Jack had started moving against him again, done with the temporary distraction that Pitch had served.

He realized, also, that Jack was staring at him as he moved atop the man in his bed, body turned just-so, as if he were mocking Pitch, taking joy in seeing how his pleasures affected the other spirit. His hands were still connected with the man beneath him and he kissed their combined fingers, moving faster. His eyes never wavered from Pitch's gaze. 

Jack wanted him to see.

Something like fire burned through Pitch as Jack's moans grew louder. It was nothing like righteous rage or just fury, though they were both things that Pitch very much wanted to feel in that moment. No, it was a feeling that heated his cheeks and his groin, that spread through him like molten gold, glittering and painful. Even as Jack began to lose control of himself and the air around him bit and stung with chill, the heat did not diminish.

Pitch watched Jack's breaths grow short and his sounds grow shorter, watched him as he finally closed his eyes, breaking his staring contest with Pitch. He watched as the young frost spirit pressed forward forcefully against the man's hips, against his cock. He watched, gaze unwavering, as Jack threw his head back and let loose a scream that shook everything in the room to its foundations.

He watched, still, as Jack slumped forward, his hands now being held up by fingers and palms and arms that were frozen solid with ice. He made tiny keening noises as he broke his fingers away, equal parts pleasure and pain, and took the human's face in his hands, turning it as if to demonstrate to Pitch what was able to so distract him from the nightmare king's presence.

He watched as Jack kissed the cheek of the man who bore Pitch's face.


	8. Chapter 8

His mouth was unusually dry and he could taste the bile rise at the back of his throat, burning and acrid.

Jack didn't bother looking at him, didn't bother taking his eyes off of the human in his hands and between his legs as the chill of his lapse in control slowly strangled the life from him. Instead, he turned the man's face back to himself and doled out deep kisses. Pitch could feel his barely thrumming pulse race at the wet sounds and the moans that punctuated the space between them. He could feel the alien, ghostly pressure of kisses on his own lips as Jack claimed those of the one that bore his face. 

His body was stiff and unmoving, as if Jack himself had frozen him in place physically rather than just mentally. It wasn't until Jack extracted himself from his position in kissing the man beneath him that he was even aware his mouth had opened slightly, as if to ask a question or shoot an insult that had been born on his tongue and died at the threshold of his own mouth. Pitch closed his mouth as he watched Jack's fingers, now shaking with the odd tenseness of sudden relaxation, move forward to slide close the eyelids of the human beneath him. 

"I waited so long for him." Jack murmured, without moving his head towards Pitch to acknowledge him properly. His fingertips traced the human's face delicately, spreading thin filaments of frost wherever they touched. "Forty years. Forty years, going on nothing much more than a hope of how he'd grow."

He paused, stroking the man's hair back in a comforting gesture that would normally be used on children. "I watch them, your disciples. I've watched them since..." Jack trailed off, facial expression going a little vacant. He let out a laugh that sounded decidedly hollow, as though he were not a sculpture of ice but a casting. "Well, it doesn't matter, does it? None of them really looked exactly like you, anyway. Not until-" he traced the bow of the man's thin lips with his finger, "Him. You could see it when he was just a little thing, how he'd grow to look like you. That was enough insurance he'd live and I could wait to see... But he's not like you. He's-"

Another pause. When Jack resumed speaking, his voice held a great deal more pain.

"He _was_ sweet. Docile. He loved talking to me, even if he didn't know if I could hear him. He reminded me of..." Jack blinked rapidly, as if trying to recall something. Pitch could feel the guilt well in the back of Jack's mind when the name escaped him. It stung him too, in a way, because Jack forgetting that particular name was also forgetting a piece of their shared history.

"Jamie?" Pitch offered. The gentleness in his voice shocked him as much as it did Jack. The frost spirit nodded vacantly.

"Yeah... I think?" He touched one of his hands to a temple delicately, as though trying to remember were a particularly onerous task for him. Given the state of his living arrangements and his willingness to spend four decades monitoring a human on the off chance they might resemble Pitch himself when they reached maturity, this was not a fact that would have been particularly surprising to Pitch. Still, Jack's voice seemed frail in a way that could be likened to thin ice that covered a roaring, deep current beneath. 

"Better, though. He didn't waste his time on _falsifiers_ , on _LIARS_ -" Just for a moment, that deep current broke through. Jack's shouts washed over and around Pitch like a riptide, his fear mixing with anger and bitterness, drawing the very core of the nightmare king into an aching thrum of need, of hunger. Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone; the tides were again covered in a delicate layer of ice. 

"He was such a good boy." Jack removed one of the human's arms from the pillars of ice around it, kissing the knuckles gingerly before he rubbed his cheek against the backs of them. "And he grew into a good man. Loyal. Beautiful. So willing to be useful."

Jack looked towards Pitch. His pupils- now pits of bright, bleeding blue in seas of milky white iris- flared and narrowed with his smile. His expression was an unspoken sentence that Pitch understood as clearly as if he'd verbalized it.

_Like I was._

"I tried to let him have a family. He didn't want one." Jack continued after a long period of silence had passed between them. His eyes found the human's face again and there was a crackling noise as he broke the human's other arm free from its icy cage. There was a great deal of affection when he spoke again. "He wanted me. So I kissed him and touched him and I waited. Waited for the day he wanted to be taken. Waited for him to be ready, to be perfect. I knew I didn't have to worry about you finding him. You never visit your temples."

The laugh he offered then was something twisted, something made of frustration and amusement and hysteria, all bound together. He clutched at his head, shaking it back and forth as if he could conceal his own mind from himself, as if he could shake away the negative emotions that Pitch could feel were swelling to the surface again. It took a full minute for him to stop it, to force the tides inside of him back down, for him to look back at Pitch. This time, his smile was again the one he'd witnessed him the first time he'd discovered Jack's propensity for disposing of humans; it was the smile he had given to the sister of the boy he'd wanted, something twice as sharp as whatever had sculpted it.

"You're never where you're supposed to be." he told Pitch, disentangling himself from the body beneath him without ever breaking eye contact. He leaned against one of the pillars of twisted birch trees, white arms almost camouflaged against the pale bark. Pitch focused intensely on the fingers that created patterns of flowers atop of the striped bark rather than the face that looked on him as though he were part of a meal or the legs that bore marks in tender flesh from Jack's previous activities. The young frost spirt let out a low, giddy giggle of amusement at that. "At least...Not until now."

That got Pitch's attention. He could feel his brow knit skeptically as his eyes were all but forced back onto Jack's face, searching him. 

"You expected me?"

"I invited you."

Pitch pressed his lips into a thin line, frowning at the frost spirit. The boy laughed at him, though the sound of it was a mockery of the bright, untroubled laugh he'd had so many centuries past. No, this was a thing that sounded breathless and harsh and hysteric, a thing that made Pitch's fingers twitch by his sides, uncertain of the need to fight or flee.

"I found you." Pitch replied snappishly. He did not enjoy being the fool to Jack's palace.

"I wanted to be found." Jack replied, sharp light still dancing in his colour-drained eyes. He straightened and slid himself off of the bed, laughing for a moment when his legs trembled as they tried to hold him upright so soon after orgasm. Pitch watched as he closed his eyes and frost seemed to spread out around his limbs, creating semi-opaque robes around his naked body. The coldness seemed to ground him, seemed to steady the shaking in his limb and soothe the edge to his posture and expression. Pitch's frown grew deeper. 

"If you didn't want to be alone, perhaps you shouldn't have left."

There was no time to react to the sheet of ice that flew at his skull as the last word left his mouth. A volley of hail and icicles followed, cutting and battering and whittling away at the nightmare king before he could tell which way was up. He found himself knocked against the door he'd entered in through, a flurry of frost and ice buffeting him from every direction. He almost couldn't open his eyes for all the sharp wind that bit at every inch of him.

"I left?" he heard Jack question, voice somehow magnified by the maelstrom, " _I_ left?! Is that what you tell yourself? Is that how you justify your ignoring me? How you justify leaving me to _rot_?" His voice turned into a low hiss that seemed to resonate from all around Pitch, making it impossible to know where to turn. 

Pitch eased himself into some of the darker shadows in the room and materialized behind Jack. He swung out with his scythe, managing to knock the other off balance before he could relocate the older spirit. 

"You did leave, Frost! You chose not to follow-"

"After you chose to leave!" Jack cried out. There was a real, true stripe of torment in his voice, as if he were just barely holding back a sob. Pitch could suddenly feel the weight in every bit of his body, as though Jack's emotional turmoil had filled his veins with lead.

"I got up so many times. I followed you, I-" tears had glazed over his eyes as he pushed himself to his feet, "I tried. I waited. I was p-patient. But you..." His sorrow turned to anger, his pain to bitterness, "You kept walking away from me. You kept toying with me. You kept ignoring me. Ignoring what you knew I needed from you."

There was a long, terrible moment where it dawned on Pitch that he had not been right. What he had done, the things he had denied the both of them for what he thought was a catalyst to Jack's continued stability had ended up being only a catalyst for his self destruction, his madness. Pitch had tried to patch the crack in the ice, but had only managed to deepen it. 

"And I tried living without you. I did. I thought, maybe, I could find someone else. Maybe if I could just find others to be with, to be around, to use or be used by, maybe... Maybe it would go away. Maybe I could be close to you and I wouldn't... I wouldn't need you so much. And then, maybe, I could be useful to you again." 

"Jack-"

"But I was wrong." Jack laughed sharply, smile as acidic as an unripe persimmon, "I do need you. I'll always need you. We were practically made for each other, right?"

Pitch lowered his scythe, grey-gold eyes flickering over Jack's figure. He felt the frost on him roll down his cheeks and neck in melted droplets and was careful not to shiver, though it felt like the touch of the boy's fingertips against his skin. Jack tipped his chin towards his neck, looking up at Pitch from under his eyelashes, expression sweet.

"So I thought you might be tempted into finding me if I made things interesting. You wouldn't have come if it were too obvious, right?" Pitch could sense that Jack was appealing to his pride in his own cunning, but there was something inside of him that preened at it, nonetheless. There was an additional drop of pride to be had at the fact that Jack had learned from Pitch's war plans so well that he'd developed his own brand of cunning.

"I wouldn't have." Pitch replied evenly. 

Though he was careful not to show the effect Jack's words had had on his vanity, he could tell by the mischievous smirk that curled on the boy's face that he already knew. Jack tilted his head to the side, exposing his neck in a swell of creamy white flesh that made the hot feeling in Pitch rise to the surface of his consciousness once more. There was something in the way that Jack's robe opened just a sliver in the front as he walked towards Pitch that was both obscene and hypnotic, less in the flesh that lay beneath and more in the way that the fluttering of the frost-made robe allowed different gradients of shadow to spread across it, allowing Pitch to imagine his own hands there, touching, possessing-

"But you did once it got fun." Jack hummed, standing just an inch shy of Pitch's own body. He looked up into Pitch's face, eyes scanning the older spirit. "Didn't you?"

"You encroached on my territory, Frost." Pitch replied, putting just a bit more distance between the two of them with a half step backwards. "The humans got to be afraid of you. Too afraid."

"Mm, but they got to falling in love with you, didn't they?" Jack retorted, his voice mild as his eyes drank in every flickering movement the nightmare king made.

"That-" Pitch bit out, forcing himself not to shy away from Jack's gaze, "Is not the point. You overstepped yourself."

Jack's smile turned lewd. "Maybe you should put me back in my place, my _king_."

The hand that found his face caused Pitch to drop his scythe, mouth opening to suck in a tiny gasp of air. It was less the chill of them- though they were, predictably, like ice itself- and more the fact that Pitch could feel that glittering, painful heat blossom beneath the skin where they touched, spreading through his veins and body like a fast acting poison. His own hand locked around Jack's wrist, searing heat against cutting cold, and he leveled a glare at the young frost spirit, though the boy continued to smile up at him.

"Fine." He spat. "I will."

Pitch removed his hand from around Jack's wrist. The light of victory, of hope that were in his pale eyes quickly drained, smile wiped clear off his features when he realized that Pitch was turning to go, to leave him. He heard Jack make a tiny noise in the back of his throat that sounded like sorrow was about to consume him whole.

"What are you doing?" Jack asked him, voice quiet with terror. Pitch could feel it in the air, in his blood. He could hear the overwhelming scream in Jack's fractured mind: _don't leave don't leave me please please don't leave me stay please_. Pitch felt a tight smile grace his own features and stopped in front of the smooth oval that served as Jack's mirror, straightening out his own robes and moving to brush the remaining snow dust and water droplets off of them in a very unaffected way.

"I'm leaving, Jack. If you're a good boy and follow, maybe I can be convinced to take pity on you." He looked down his nose at Jack, his haughty stance and fed-up expression apparent in his reflection. "But I have no time to babysit selfish, needy little brats who only want someone to play games with. You know...Someone like you."

"No..." Jack choked, expression bereft as he reached towards Pitch. "Please...Pitch..."

"Goodbye, Frost." Pitch told him, batting the young frost spirit's hand away as though it had been a particularly annoying gnat. He was about to turn on his heel when he heard something crackling. 

Pitch turned back to look at Jack, non-existent eyebrow arched, but the sound was not coming from the boy who was looking at him with a face blanked of any hint of sadness but for the tears that slid down his face in melty, dripping tracks of ice. He swiveled about, trying to make sense of the noise, and watched as Jack walked forward, closer to the mirror rather than the spirit standing in front of it.

"Before you go, I thought you might want to see something." Jack said, just shy of actually explaining the noise. "I explored the warren. You know...Bunnymund's home?" 

Pitch watched the boy press himself against the mirror. His right arm reached forward and sank through the ice there as easily as if it had been water, though there was not a ripple to be had on the rest of the surface. He pulled back from it, clutching something golden and egg shaped in one of his hands. Pitch was puzzled for a moment as to why the boy would have collected an egg, a symbol of the Guardian of Hope, when Jack seemed to hate the pooka as much as Pitch did, himself. Yet, there was something that seemed off about the egg, in the raised indentions in it. He couldn't, not for the life of him, understand why his stomach churned at the sight of it.

"It turns out that he ended up being good for something, after all." 

Jack smiled beatifically at Pitch, who felt uneasy in the extreme at this sudden change in emotions. He felt his scythe re-materialize in his own hands as he scanned Jack for some sort of clue as to his source of serenity. Obviously he intended this egg to be a gift. It had to be, didn't it? It was golden and ornate, with moons and stars and he could swear there was something in it that he remembered, something powerful. Hadn't the rabbit kept it close, hadn't it been important? Wasn't this boon-

"No." Pitch murmured. His eyes widened as Jack twisted the two sections of the egg apart.

Blistering light filled the room through the holes that had been opened in the egg. It tore at Pitch, consumed his senses. There was nothing that he could feel or see or think that wasn't obliterated by the overwhelming burning sensation that the light fell on him with. He was covered by it, anointed with it, and there was nothing that he could do to escape. His scythe fell from his hands, peeling away from reality particle by particle.

And there, in the midst of it all, were two hands holding his face, holding him still as the light scorched the darkness in his tainted flesh. He opened his mouth to scream.

A pair of cold lips stole a kiss.


	9. Chapter 9

Pitch had not been aware of slipping into darkness, at first.

To say that he had not been aware of it, though, was no particularly small wonder. The light Jack had unleashed upon him threw him into a living hell where every nerve ending he possessed was alight with agony, where every thrash against the pain gave birth to a hundred new variations. He was so utterly enthralled in his own suffering that he did not notice when it finally became too much for him, when he finally sank down into the depths of unconsciousness. 

It was the total awareness of the horrible burden that his physical body was now facing that caused him to not recognize he was no longer fully conscious. The black void that he normally resided in when he slept was full of light that seemed to have leaked in from behind his eye sockets, casting itself on the cavernous walls of his mind. He screamed in full, still imagining that they were causing him pain, and only stopped when they began to disperse fully, at last, ultimately overtaken by the darkness that resided within him.

Pitch had stood shakily, eyes darting and head swiveling as if to make certain that the destructive brightness was doubling back to come and deal him a final blow. He had not felt such terror, such anguish in such a long time that he was unable to mask his emotions, unable to think correctly- indeed, everything ran together in a hazy blur of tears and burning. He struggled against the mist of fright to try and place his surroundings. He felt, at first, a tiny sliver of hope that perhaps he had triumphed over Jack's plan. Perhaps, he thought, there was a small part of him that had felt the instinct to survive so keenly it had allowed him to gather power in a situation where he had none and transport himself into somewhere he did; perhaps it had taken him to somewhere like this, calm and dark, where he could think everything over and lick his wounds in peace.

Yet, when he reached out to his shadows to come and assist him, they did not. There were no fearlings or nightmares or shadows of any sort in this place. There resided only darkness and himself, he realized, and it was with fresh horror that he groaned and sank to his knees. His body had pressed his consciousness inside of itself, too weakened and damaged by the light to allow Pitch to remain awake and bear the pain. Who knew what sort of havoc Jack was wreaking upon him now that he was unable to resist?

And he really couldn't resist, he knew. Pitch sensed that he would not be able to awaken for quite some time, despite knowing that he was asleep, and this caused him even more distress. He found that he was not only worried for himself but worried for... Well. Oddly, he was worried for Jack. That the boy had taken their game of domination quite so far betrayed a deep, bleeding wound that seemed as though it had festered, unchecked, for far too long. He was worried the boy might harm the humans too far, lose too much of their mutual believers, render the both of them too weak without Pitch there to stay his hand and temper the boy's emotions and impulses.

He was worried Jack would self destruct in his absence.

And so Pitch found himself spending a great deal of time worrying, for he found his conjecture to be true: he could not force his body to awaken from its slumber, nor did he have any control over the shadows that resided outside of it. They were, he presumed, searching for him, but if his body were still consumed in the glow of the first light, then even his strongest nightmares and fearlings could not contemplate trying to breech the entrance to Jack's room. What was more, if he had been clever enough to harvest the light, then there was no telling what sorts of devices Jack might have in store to fend off the shadowy masses.

There was no hope of a rescue, then. He could only pace around the vast darkness of his mind, worrying away at all the different possibilities that could have led himself and Jack to this point, worrying about what could possibly come from it all. What was it that Jack sought to gain from him? Surely it wasn't as simple as companionship, for that was what he had offered all along. More than companions, they had been partners! Joint rulers! What could he have possibly done to show the boy he cared more than what he'd already done for him? Hadn't the rewards of their relationship been many? Didn't Jack receive all the power, all the belief, all the fearful little toys he could have ever wanted?

Such questions led him back only to Jack's accusations, to the pain he seemed to suffer at the mere thought of Pitch leaving him. Pitch had only been trying to do him a kindness, hadn't he? He had walked away all those times when Jack was indecent, exposed... When he was _vulnerable_. Had he been in Jack's situation, helplessly overcome with the lust for something yet unnamed, completely unable to control himself, he wouldn't have wanted his partner, his peer, his equal to see him so pathetic. 

Would he?

He sighed, resigning himself for the one thousand, two hundred, sixty first time since this hibernation of sorts had begun. Resting his chin on the narrow palm of his hand, he wondered how much time had passed. Had it been years? Eons? Or only moments? After all, if this was a dream of sorts, well... One could experience a lifetime in only a few minutes of actual dreaming. Since Pitch didn't exactly dream, perhaps he was simply thinking at warp speed instead, trapped for what seemed like forever when it was, realistically, only a brief lapse in consciousness. 

Even as he thought this, he felt his mind make a strange lurch, as if he had finally broken through some sort of barrier. Yet, it was not a barrier he had been seeking to break, because he reeled at the feeling of it, cursing whatever existed that ensured he'd be able to feel such pain and disorientation in his own mind. He was sucking in a deep breath- or, at least, the memory of one- when the lurching motion came back. There was no way to steady himself and he fell, his vision beginning to blur. He felt as though all around him were vibrations of some sort of grand demolition, that the force it was rendering was demolishing the barrier between his soul and his body.

Like an oil spill, he seeped back into his shell through the cracks.

It was a painful feat to even open his eyes. They felt as though they'd been crusted closed with cement, but actually, Pitch recognized the small cold sparks falling off his eyelashes as snow crystals. He offered out a little hiss of pain and heard the tell-tale crackling of breaking frost as his mouth made a bid for movement. Blinking the sleep from his eyes, he rotated his neck to try and get his bearings.

All around him was a bright, pulsating glow that made Pitch flinch away from it instinctively, though it did not seem to be touching his skin. Much to his alarm, he found that he couldn't move away from it properly, that he had no means of self defense because he couldn't free his limbs. He wrenched his body violently in an attempt to break off whatever was holding him down, expecting it to be only a slightly thicker layer of frost, but he was held fast by his wrists, waist, and ankles in shackles of ice that seemed frozen solid to whatever he was laying on.

He felt his breath hitch purely on instinct and he felt his diseased heart hammer painfully in his chest, against his rib cage. His own element consumed him as he thrashed like a wild animal that had been cornered, caged, restrained with no prior experience in being so. All he knew was that the pulsating light that surrounded him was dangerously close and that he could feel a slight sting with every crescendo of brightness.

Yet, it was not the burning that he had felt before, he realized. Slowly, very slowly, he began to calm, forcing himself to breathe regularly and take a good stock of his situation. Jack was already off-kilter, and so Pitch reminded himself that that meant he needed to be balanced. Rationality was the only thing that would mend the situation. He was certain of it.

Pitch examined his surroundings now, willing his vision to be clearer, to be just as focused in concentration as when it had been hazy in panic. He realized that he was laying on the bed he had seen before; he could make out the pillars of interwoven birch trees on all four sides around him, as well as the covers and cushions made from fine materials that felt soft and pleasantly cool underneath his aching body. The material he could see was grey now, instead of white, and was embroidered and dyed with intricate patterns of black, as though Jack had sought out materials that would make this prison more comforting to Pitch, more to his tastes.

He scoffed at the idea, though there was a strange sort of sad affection that came at his expense and killed any derision the noise might've held. That Jack had seen it fit to try and match his assumed needs or desires betrayed the feelings of tenderness that the boy still had for him, and for that, Pitch didn't think he could bring himself to be entirely spiteful. He was in a cage, yes- but a cage that was meant to allow him to make him comfortable in his time of weakness... A cage that was more hospital than it was prison.

At least, he hoped that Jack had intended for it to be so.

The so-called cage was made up of not just the bed frame, but of sheets of ice that were built up around it. They were hung with delicate black crepe that had been stitched with intricate gold patterns that allowed just enough light to shine through from outside the makeshift tomb to keep Pitch weak and dizzied, unable to muster any strength or find any shadow around him in which to sink through. Not even one grain of tainted dream sand remained in the bed or around it, as though Jack had made it a special point to deny Pitch access to even the tiniest fraction of power. 

He grinned to himself and offered a dry, wry, rasping chuckle. Jack was so suspicious of Pitch's cunning that he refused to allow even a modicum of his weaponry near. He couldn't deny his pride in the boy's caution. The decades by his side prior to all this had taught him well. He'd tempered that reckless abandon of his earlier existence with carefully measured suspicion, ever the wiser and ever the cleverer for it. It was part, Pitch thought to himself, of what made Jack able to entrap him. 

"Pitch?" 

The voice seemed as though it should be muffled, for the ice walls reached from the frame of the bed all around him, without a crack through which light or dark could creep in unannounced or unplanned. Yet it was clear as a bell, as if Jack had been speaking from inside the little box he was being kept in, as though the boy were invisible and Pitch could not see him, though he tried.

"Pitch?" he asked again, and suddenly the noise was closer, too intense, and Pitch couldn't keep himself from moaning lowly in pain as his name reverberated in his ears. A gentle sound was made in the back of Jack's throat and Pitch could somehow... Somehow _feel_ the younger spirit moving towards him, like the press of an unseeable death mask over the whole of his body. A shiver tore through him, tightening his muscles painfully, involuntarily, as frost began to reform over the top of his skin.

He turned his head and saw a pale arm sink through the thick ice as though it were nothing more than an illusion- it was just the same as when Jack had reached into the mirror and, indeed, the rest of the frost spirit's body followed through just as easily. Pitch might've taken him for a ghost if he hadn't felt the weight of Jack's body weigh down the mattress and all the blankets as he knelt at the foot of the bed. He again wore that odd, beatific mask of a smile, deadened eyes fixed on Pitch with a mockery of affection in them.

"So you _are_ awake." he crooned gently, stroking along the skin over the metatarsals on Pitch's right foot with the backs of his knuckles. The simple gesture practically overloaded Pitch's senses, as though his touch starved body anticipated only pain from contact, though his mind knew that Jack didn't intend it. Jack's smile remained in place as Pitch fixed him with a weak glare. "I've been waiting a long time for you to wake up. I was very worried."

"Perhaps if you hadn't tried to _kill_ me-" Pitch began to hiss, but he found ice crusting on his tongue as Jack wagged one of his fingers patronizingly.

"I can't kill fear." The grin on his face made Pitch want to tear the boy's liver out and force him to eat it. From the way Jack's grin widened, he could see that his feelings were all too apparent in his expression. 

"I hadn't actually planned on it." he continued, fingertips gently massaging the underside of Pitch's foot. The sore muscles screamed, but there was an odd kind of pleasure in it, too. "I only meant to weaken you. The light was much more effective than I'd thought it would be."

He looked at Pitch sympathetically, smile apologetic. "Sorry about that."

The nightmare king fixed him with a very vexed look, stretching his tongue as he felt it thaw inside of his mouth. When at last he felt he could trust it to its purpose, he clicked it at Jack disapprovingly. "You don't seem very sorry at all. Do pardon my saying so, dearest."

"Of course, darling." Jack replied tightly, voice equally venomous.

He shifted, taking his hand off of Pitch's foot so that he could lift his robes a bit as he navigated himself farther up the bed in order to be closer to Pitch's face. The older spirit could see that Jack's left hand held a chalice of hammered gold in it. He seemed careful to touch only the base of the stem on it, all too conscious of the heat that seemed to be radiating from inside the cup itself. 

"Don't look so suspicious." Jack chided, looking properly offended. "I went to all the trouble of bringing you something to drink, and you look at it like it's poison."

There was a small piece of silence between them.

"...Is it, though?" Pitch asked bluntly. Jack leveled an entirely nonplussed look at him.

" _No._ " he half-hissed, "It's not."

"I don't suppose you'd care to unbind me so I can examine it?"

"No." Jack said sweetly, reaching over to fluff one of the cushions behind Pitch's head. "I really don't."

He pressed the cup to Pitch's lips and tipped it forward, frowning when Pitch pressed his own lips shut against the warm liquid. 

"Drink." Jack told him.

Pitch's eyes narrowed and he lifted his chin a bit, as if daring the boy to make him.

In retrospect, he probably should have considered that Jack, as he was, was not going to take no for an answer. He realized this mistake around the time that the fingers of Jack's right hand shot against Pitch's throat, battering his windpipe in a way that made him open his mouth reflexively. Quick as mercury, he moved his fingers into Pitch's mouth, holding his jaws apart as he smiled serenely at the older spirit.

Pitch growled deep in his throat and bit down into Jack's fingers. His eyes widened when the boy didn't even flinch, instead spreading his fingers apart to pry Pitch's mouth a little wider, nails pressing into the nightmare king's soft palette. He could taste blood run down his tongue and into the back of his throat, but it was cool and somehow...Somehow watery, as though there were real ice in Jack's veins that was melting as Pitch consumed it. Then he felt warm metal and liquid pressed to his lips again. There was a sudden explosion of flavour and warmth on his tongue, heady spices of mulled winter wine mixing with the metallic tang of blood from the bites he'd inflicted on Jack.

When Pitch was sure the boy had dumped a solid half of the goblet into his throat, Jack withdrew his hand, expression expectant and a little excited.

"Now was that so ba-?"

Pitch spat the wine back in Jack's face.

For a moment, the boy sat back on his knees, expression completely shocked. He looked almost innocent, his pale eyes round, their glassy shine giving him the look of a bizarre china doll. His blue-white lips hung apart just slightly and the dark red of the wine and blood that dripped down his face and neck and robe only served to make his skin look more like porcelain, like a velvet marble statue come to life.

"...Darling..." Jack said at long last, grabbing Pitch's jaw with his injured hand. There was already ice blooming over the wounds, staunching the bleeding, and Jack's grip was like a vice. "I went to all the trouble of making this just for you. It's nice and strong and sweet. It's hot, too. Do you know how difficult it is for me to make a fire in this place, just to brew you a cup of wine? Every day? Until you woke up?"

There was a tinge of hysteria in the base notes of his voice, and Pitch could sense that he was teetering on the precipice of rage. But there was something holding him back, some sort of innate safe guard born from his respect- or, perhaps, love- of Pitch that kept him from outright damaging the older spirit.

Still, he pressed his fingers again into Pitch's mouth, jerking it open in a motion that made the nightmare king hiss in pain. He felt ice curl around Jack's fingers and begin to crystalize in his mouth, causing a pillar of burning cold that kept his mouth open while Jack held down his tongue with one hand and emptied the rest of the warm liquid down his throat with the other. Pitch swallowed it, knowing that trying to make himself gag probably wouldn't do him much good at this point. Jack seemed rather determined that he should drink, whether or not he resisted.

"There we are." Jack murmured. He set down the chalice and moved his hand to stroke Pitch's brow soothingly. 

It was a short lived comfort. Jack removed his fingers from Pitch's tongue and forcibly yanked out the bar of ice he'd left as a sort of prop, ripping away a bit of skin as he did so. When Pitch yelped, he made another apologetic face, though Pitch could see there was no real remorse in it. 

"Next time, don't make me have to use one." he chided, voice soft.

"Perhaps," Pitch spat, swallowing the dark blood in his mouth, "Next time you could remove these restraints and make me less suspicious of your motives."

"You have no reason to be afraid." Jack grinned, admiring the hollow of Pitch's cheek as he stroked it with the back of one finger.

"I am uniquely qualified to say when one should or should not be afraid." Pitch hissed in response, "And your actions most definitely bring me to the defensive."

Jack looked at him with an almost surprised expression, as though he really couldn't fathom what Pitch was telling him. It was that same, eerie stripe of innocence that made Pitch all the more wary. It was the kind of look that meant that Jack really didn't comprehend the depth of his actions, the threat that they represented. He realized he couldn't kill Pitch, and so he saw no limit to the pain he could cause him.

"I don't want to hurt you." Jack said, voice all softness. He moved to cup Pitch's face between his hands gingerly, as if he were suddenly afraid the man might turn to dust beneath his touch. 

"Then what in Lunar's name are you trying-"

He was cut off when the young frost spirit leaned in, sealing their mouths together. Instantly, his mind travelled back to the flash of the first light, to the pain he'd felt when Jack's lips were last on his. He wanted to draw back, to escape from the kiss, from the memory, but there was nowhere to turn. Again, he forced himself to calm.

But he wasn't prepared for the way that Jack pressed forward, more passionately, the flesh of his mouth insistently, impossibly supple against Pitch's own lips. He wasn't prepared for the way that the boy's tongue lapped at his lips, between them, seeking out the bitter, sharp taste of Pitch's own blood on the inside of the elder spirit's cheek. When he bit down on Jack's tongue, he expected a moan of pain, not of pleasure. 

He expected the boy's nails to dig into the flesh of his neck still less.

Least of all did he expect to like it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are two amazing pieces of artwork that were done for this story. I'm so chuffed and I really wanted to share them with everyone!
> 
> By user ashbound: http://ashbound.deviantart.com/art/Kiss-of-Death-358137122?ga_submit_new=10%253A1362639948
> 
> By user RunicHealer: http://runic-healer.deviantart.com/art/Weakening-Eye-of-Day-358008323
> 
> Thank you two again, so, so much!


	10. Chapter 10

The development was, to say the least, upsetting.

Pitch had never once had to consider the baser instincts of mortals. In the entirety of his memory, he had gone from the amorphous amalgamate of feelings that went bump in the dark corners of prehistoric life to what he was now, a being ever more complex as the world grew around him. He was familiar with the bubbling chemical screams of flowers and the frantic thrumming of stars, the clash of molecules combining, twisting into something else entirely. There had never been a need to feel back then, to interact with the world any more than feeding, an oozing sensation of instinctive terror from one thing to the next.

But the world changed. Pitch changed. It wasn’t something he had meant to do, it was just something that was. The organic fear he had always been had developed, had gestated in the womb of evolution as much as the creatures around him. Humans came. Humans came, rich with fear. It was how they taught themselves, taught each other. It was who they were, deep down. Fear, and fear, and fear again, and Pitch had been drawn to them.

His form had stalked them in the shadows, in the night. Fight, flee, protect, defend – he had urged them onwards, and they had rewarded him with an abundance of fear so great that everything before seemed to pale in comparison. The amorphous mass of shadows had stretched, upwards, long and mean. They whispered stories about him.

The slender one. The deadly one. The shadow. The monster.

Humans feared themselves most of all. Everything environmental was incidental to them, but the idea of a stranger stalking them in their most vulnerable moments left them on edge. It was an intimate relationship, an addiction he couldn’t be free from.

He started to feel things. Not just secondary emotions, the thrumming after math of his handiwork; he felt jealousy, and tenderness, and hatred. He felt want.

But never once had he let himself slip into the mundanities of mortal want. Hunger, desire – they were filthy things, things that Pitch had never wanted for himself. He didn’t want it then, either, even as Jack’s fingers curled into his neck, even connected so intimately.

Clearly, it was an involuntary exercise in sympathy. It was the only way to rationalize it, and so Pitch set to driving sympathy from his heart, or whatever he had approximated for it. He spat back Jack’s tongue, went still beneath his mouth. The boy didn’t know what he was doing, he told himself. Jack never really had.

The fingers at his throat twitched, dug inwards more as Jack seemed to come to the realization of what was happening. A desperate, strangled noise wrenched at the back of his throat as he pulled back to look at Pitch’s face, eyes searching for a meaning to the sudden lack of stimulus.

“You don’t know what you’re doing to us, Jack.” Pitch told him, his voice as stern as he could make it. “You’re a god. Don’t lower yourself to these things.”

The boy looked at him a moment longer before his face pinched with an emotion that Pitch realized was anger, something he’d so rarely had time to consider on Jack’s face that it made him look alien.

“These things. _These things_? Love, Pitch? Desire? Human things, from a human heart? Things I feel, because I am human?” The shaking in his fingers had spread to his hands, and Jack paused, face falling slack as he looked at the frost burn on them. His voice dropped quiet, and he amended, “Because I _was_ human.”

Pitch waited, waited for Jack to still. Time meant nothing to the two of them, and though Pitch had never found much of a strong suit in passivity, he steeled himself to afford one, now. Eventually, Jack always went back to what he had been – the ebb and flow of his emotions were as sure as the phases of the moon, even if they’d grown equally opaque as of late, clouded over in his partner’s head.

“I do love you, Jack.” Pitch told him. Jack didn’t look at him, shook his head as though clearing a gnat from the air around it.

“You don’t know what that word means.” he protested.

“I care for you. I’ve shared my power with you. I’ve never kept anything from you.” the shadow protested. “If I’ve ignored your weaknesses it’s because I respect you-“

Pitch found his tongue frozen over in ice, blistering as his body rushed to adjust to it. Jack’s eyes were on him now, the concentration of blue at their centers unrealistically bright. It was difficult to look at, a pulsating glow that reminded him too much of the light shattering what little power hadn’t already been stricken from his body. It made his head ache just to meet that gaze, but he did so, regardless.

“You ignored my needs, Pitch. You called my emotions a weakness and you trampled them underfoot. You let me neglect myself to serve you.” His hand settled on Pitch’s chin, fingers gripping his face, firmly. Jack did not blink. “That’s not love or respect. It’s enslavement.”

“And what do you call all of this?” Pitch replied, tongue stiff but teeth sharp enough to break away the frost atop it.

Jack looked around them for a moment, as though he had forgotten where they were. He shrugged, as though it were all incidental.

“I think the phrase you used was collateral damage, wasn’t it?” he said, mild. “I thought they would substitute, at first. If I could just connect with someone, the need would go away and I could be perfect for you again.”

Watching him was watching any number of gruesome and beautiful things that Pitch had witnessed in his life; it was an art in trying to remain very still and very quiet. Unfortunately, these weren’t things that Pitch was very skilled in.

“Jack-“

“I tried.” he cut in, looking back at the nightmare king. Something about his expression was plaintive, desperate, as though he needed Pitch to understand. “I tried to keep it all controlled. I tried to control myself. With you, with them. I tried, but. Pitch, the only thing I’m good at is controlling other people.”

He shivered again, but this time, his eyes went wide with revelation. “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s the answer.”

This time, Pitch shivered, too. “So I’m to be another victim, is that it?”

“I can’t make you do anything you don’t want to. I can’t make anybody do that. But I can make you understand what it’s like. Desire is really just a different kind of fun, isn’t it?” he murmured. His hands worked to form something between them.

“You’ve turned a host of strangers into your personal menagerie.” Pitch hissed at him.

“Willingly. They had needs. Things that were in their hearts all along.” Jack fixed him with another stare, pupiless eyes calculating. Pitch stared instead at the little lotus he had made from ice, barely big enough for a mouthful. “I want to know what hides in yours.”

He didn’t have a chance to speak. Jack was too quick for him, had pressed the little flower into Pitch’s mouth. His lips were sealed before he had the chance to spit it out, to bite down and break it prematurely. Instead, he was left with it sitting on his tongue, the sharp points of the petals pressing in against his soft palette.

It was uncomfortable, yes, but more uncomfortable was Jack’s hand against his cheek, stroking it as though they were old lovers. He leaned down and pressed a kiss to the middle of Pitch’s forehead.

“You’ll understand. Sooner or later.” Jack told him, sliding backwards.

He gave Pitch a final look, long and lingering. Then he swept out through the wall of ice, and all was quiet.

-

It turned out that what was hiding within Pitch was a host of very unwelcome side effects.

The ice flowers melted within a few days or so, as far as he could tell. Not that Pitch could tell much from inside his bed, the walls iced off, curtains drawn. But Jack provided him with a little report sometimes, talking to him while Pitch’s mouth was either occupied with one flower or being forced open for another.

It was hard to pay attention during those moments, though. The flowers had a curious effect of making Jack’s proximity nearly unbearable, a myriad of things he hadn’t noticed before. His scent, the scent of lake water and pitch pines and sleet, almost entirely devoid of human musk; the lilt of his quiet voice, rolling up through Pitch’s ears and sloshing around his head until his brain felt waterlogged.

The drippings from the flower were sweet, tasted like honeysuckle for reasons that Pitch couldn’t really comprehend. He could feel every drop burn inside of him, roll down his tongue and throat and drip in to his belly.

That physical sensation alone would have been terrible, so distracting that Pitch could hardly make himself focus on anything else. But there was Jack, too – Jack, who would stroke his hair, or his face, who would kiss his hands and feet. Every touch made his body tense, jerk, as if trying to react to something that Pitch himself didn’t want to acknowledge.

If this was what humans felt, he thought, then mortal existence was worse than he had ever dreamed. It was no wonder humans were so stupid; trying to think past what he felt was rapidly driving him mad.

It wasn’t just the waking world that taxed him, either; Pitch would fall asleep in the duller moments of Jack’s absence, only to find him returned in dreams. Snowy limbs stretched out for him in the oblivion, icy fingers at his throat and face. Nettles of ice stung at his ribs, his hips, and he would wake, disoriented, to the pulsating blankness of white light, and the trappings of his bed.

The worst parts were the ones he wasn’t entirely sure were false; the moments where he would swear he had blinked himself to wakefulness, but Jack would be there, his mouth melting against the hot press of Pitch’s lips, the heat of him still untamed. He would imagine the pressure of that slender body over his own, cold angles and frozen sweat on top of soft skin.

It seemed real. It seemed like Jack really was there with him, that it was his own consort, rutting against Pitch’s entrapped body, breath hitched into little moans. Silken robes would come undone for him, only acting as a cover for what happened beneath as they draped over Pitch and Jack, over the heat and the flush on Jack’s throat as his body coiled, tense with pleasure until he came. Until he curled over Pitch, and kissed his face, and told him he was sorry in hushed, tearful tones.

He would have sworn to it. But he would blink, again, and there would be no one there, and Pitch could never crane his neck far enough to see whether or not there was a frozen, whitish film to the ice that restrained the rest of him.

It didn’t stop him from feeling dirty, all the same.


	11. Chapter 11

It was rare for Jack to stay away from him for long.

Pitch was his fascination; his life, in its entirety. Pitch had never debated or doubted this fact whatever. It was clear that Jack was still his, whatever madness consumed his mind now. Whether or not he would be punished wasn’t a question, but then, neither was the fact that his tactics had been successful. The shadow king had been forced to admit to himself that there was more to what he had wanted than merely a temporary weakness.

The hunger inside of him had nearly consumed Pitch.

So it took a great deal of effort to tamp that down when Jack came to him one night, staggering in through a bluster of chilled wind that Pitch could very much hear, although he never felt its effects. But then, it took a great deal of effort, too, not to notice the way Jack curled half way over his feet rather than sitting at his side.

A change had been taking place for a while, something the flowers that Pitch kept being forced to consume wouldn’t let him ignore. Every detail of Jack was an area of immediate, obsessive interest, and so he could not ignore that the boy’s skin had lost most of its creamy pigment, skin sucked of colour as much as his hair.

He was changing, like any spirit. Like Pitch had, before, as he was likely to, again. He looked sculpted from actual snow now, the grim specter of guilt hard packed into his features. It made him glitter and glisten as he moved, even in the dimness of the light from inside of Pitch’s personal cage.

The skin where he touched at his ankles was radiating, Pitch’s gut coiling with every cool breath that ghosted across his shins. The soft flutter of Jack’s lashes made him grind his teeth, but he waited for the boy to speak, enough personal restraint left to at least manage that.

“I killed him.” Jack said.

Pitch was silent. The statement applied to many, now, and he wasn’t entirely sure that the magnitude of that scale wasn’t just beginning to dawn on Jack. The frost spirit didn’t look up at him.

“Old man winter. I killed him.” he murmured. “Yuki-Onna, Psonen, Poliahu… They’re all gone. I killed them, Pitch. But he was left. And then…”

His lips had been so numb from ice for so long that Pitch hardly realized he could separate them again. He found it was easier to speak than listen, though on recollection, that had always been the case.

“It’s the way things are. The strong survive. You’re the strongest now, Jack.” Pitch told him. Frankly, he was surprised that the others had made it so far, that there was any spirit left at all who could have been mistaken for having some sort of control over Jack’s element. But sometimes, wires got crossed. Especially with humans concerned.

Jack’s body curled inward, as though the statements had caused him an actual, physical pain. Pitch frowned, used his accelerated heart rate to do something other than struggle against the warmth pooling in his gut; he got angry.

“This is how it was meant to be, Jack – this is what you and I agreed to. Us, united, with all the power in the world. You’re meant to be a god. Don’t mourn those who can’t evolve with you.” he snapped. One of Jack’s hands squeezed his ankle.

“We’re not united. You’re here. I’ve got you, here.” Jack murmured. He turned his head, and Pitch could see the snowflakes still clinging to his lashes, improbably resilient. His eyes resembled the ice that had built up all around him, a translucent semi-opaqueness that caught blue, or grey, or white, depending on what it was up against. “You’re weakened. There’s no one who can stop me. There’s no one –“

Jack’s breath caught in his throat, and he hid his face back against Pitch’s legs. He didn’t mean it, but the fear he could feel welling up there was giving Pitch more strength, a drug temporarily more addictive and pressing than whatever the strange snow blossoms had been helping to brew inside of him.

“No one?” Pitch murmured, stoking the fire a little. “No one for poor. Little. Jack?”

It was a move that was stupid and brilliant at the same time, he found. Jack was highly reactive to his words as ever, to notions of isolation, and the fear that bloomed inside of him went through Pitch like morphine to a man dying, a downward spiral of all the fretting worries that had accumulated in Jack the perfect nourishment for Pitch.

“It was supposed to be you!” Jack hissed, a vine of ice climbing Pitch’s body, sharp spikes of ice that shot upwards, into him and on top of him. The shadow spirit couldn’t help it felt like a hand, nails raking up against his leg, something that made him try to move himself up towards it, shameless and half lost to the richness of feedback he was getting physically. “This wasn’t supposed to happen! I don’t want –“

His voice cut with a small sob as Jack lifted himself up. He staggered backwards, crashed against the wall around Pitch’s bed before he remembered to meld through it. The words were left unsaid, but Pitch could hear them rattling around in Jack’s mind, increasingly distant:

I don’t want to be alone.

-

Idleness was became taxing on the shadow spirit, after that.

Jack didn’t return. He hadn’t returned in what Pitch estimated must have been a very long time, because he no longer felt the active effects of the little ice flowers he’d been fed. There were no feverish aches all day, no feelings that made him squirm and writhe in his bonds when so much as a melted drop of water rolled down his skin.

It didn’t stop altogether, though. He still dreamt, though he had no idea why. He still felt his mind wander back to unwelcome thoughts, to the form of Jack’s body, to all the slivers of flesh he’d seen over the years. His mind picked out unhelpful thoughts and transmuted them to something else: the feeling of Jack’s hands around his waist became the feeling of Jack’s hands slipping beneath his own robes, beneath his coats, beneath his clothes, stroking over the greyed planes of his abdomen; Jack’s body leaning against his became all that was needed to send him into a fit of agony over being unable to move.

He was convinced it wouldn’t have been a problem if he could have relieved himself in some way. But the fact of the matter was that he was increasingly sure that Jack was the only way, that his singular thoughts wouldn’t allow him any other kind of peace.

But Jack was nowhere to be found.

It hadn’t distressed him at first; he had spent a good deal of his relationship with Jack tolerating the other’s unexplained disappearances. Even if it had ultimately led to this, he had faith that it was as bad as it could be for the snow spirit.

There were other matters to consider, besides. It had taken a while for him to notice that the restraints on his body had begun to give way. The walls to his cage had started to chip and melt, too, the first light apparently giving off at least a little heat.   
  
At first, it amounted to very little. But as the days rolled by, the restraints became thinner, weaker, and eventually, Pitch found himself able to prise his body from them, ice snapping away from his wrists, his throat.

His torso took more work, but he managed, frost bitten fingers paying no attention to the relative discomfort of the task. He peeled away the ice on his leg, the shackles on his ankles, before he was obliged to fall back on the bed, his vision going black with the effort it had taken.

Pitch had expected, somehow, that Jack would have known. That he would be rebound when he awakened, and there would be Jack, staring at him. It was almost with a vague disappointment that he realized this wasn’t the case.

Still, it gave him time to concentrate.

Very carefully, Pitch wrapped himself in the cloth that Jack had hung up around the walls of his bed. They had mostly fallen down, anyway, resulting in that pulsing light that still gave Pitch blinding headaches. But if he worked quickly, he reasoned, it would give him enough time to enact his plan.

He set to breaking off wood from the frame of the actual bed, chipping away at the thinnest part of the left wall. The work was long, and arduous, and involved frequent, unsophisticated expressions of crude feelings in multiple languages, but he was rewarded with a small hole.

Pitch turned the hole into a split, and the split into a shattering force that broke the left wall. He barely had time to cover his face from the light that poured in all about him. But he was right in his guess – the fabric was thick, rich silk with a tight weft, thicker for all its embroidery.

His hands were exposed, and they blistered and burned as he made his way to the wall before him, the heat of the first light working through the frost that had frozen them through, hurting even if he hadn’t been diametrically opposed to the element of light in every way.

But it was enough. It took no time at all to feel the radiating source of heat inside of the room’s wall. He had expected to need to break through it, but it had melted clear away in Jack’s absence. Or perhaps he’d never seen the need to repair it, with Pitch securely locked away.

The shadow king seized it, screaming in pain but not letting go, the force of its reaction to him like fire throughout his body, variable and unable to be ignored. But he held on, twisted it, and forced the two halves back together.

The egg clattered to the floor as Pitch dropped it, unable to keep it in his hands now that he could feel the cool darkness of the room swirl back around him. This time, he didn’t faint; he was in excruciating pain, but the strength that the shadows afforded to him was more than he had felt in what seemed like years. Eons.

It flooded his system and he dropped to his knees, leaning against the wall as he tried to take it all in, feeling his senses return to him, as though he had been frozen solid in every aspect and had only now noticed it.

He could sense his night mares, still roaming the world. He could feel his black dream sand fluttering about in the breezes. He could feel the deep, healing, safety of his shadows, of his connection with the darkness flooding back into him, begging him: come home, flee, protect.

Slowly, the firestorm in his body subsided. His nerve endings no longer felt like every star in the universe was going super nova inside of him, and he took this for healing.

Pitch sat, and absorbed, and waited. His body remembered how to cloak itself in shadows, and he peeled away the silks that he had used for protection. He expected it to heal the rest of itself, too, to drive out the poison that Jack had put in them. To repair his hands.

But his body remembered Jack, in a way he couldn’t entirely chalk up to vengeance. His hands glowed red as burning embers, smouldered in the chill of the castle, even after Pitch had watched the days turn over through the waves beyond the walls of Jack’s castle.

He could have run. Maybe he should have. But Pitch was not a spirit to back down. And so he cloaked the corners of Jack’s castle in all the shadow he could manage.

And waited.

 


	12. Chapter 12

 It took a long time still for Jack to return.

Pitch began to resent it; Jack was so unconcerned with the threat of him escaping that apparently he thought he could simply leave him indefinitely. Either that, or he was too consumed with himself.

Likely both, Pitch thought, as he bided his time.

He had preoccupied himself with Jack’s castle. Specifically, the act of going through it, observing each and every body, and categorically removing them from the walls, spiriting them away to places he could reach with his shadows – caverns, grottoes, mines. Places where their bodies could rest, undisturbed.

It had been a trade, he thought. Jack was right – Pitch had been overcome with a haze of lust when he had been drugged, but it hadn’t interfered with his ability to restrain himself when he had truly wanted to. He hadn’t lost who he was – it was just harder to ignore the parts of himself he usually tried to, force him to admit they were there, to examine if he could take what he wanted. If he hadn’t been physically restrained, he may have run into Jack’s arms as any of the others did.

All that was left was to lay them to rest. So that was what he did, tuck them away deep within the earth, where their spirits could find some peace. He refused to think about why he wanted that for them. Why he cared.

Not that peace was on Pitch’s mind very often. He spent a good deal of his time pacing, blasting sections of Jack’s palace clean of their decorations, and a good deal more painting shadows and more shadows, until the castle was grey and dim, it’s ornate detailing worn smooth and even into sharp angles.

It wasn’t a place Jack recognized when he set foot in it again.

The bed he had made had been… Not so much dismantled as inherently changed. The wood on it was no longer the soft white of birch, but blackened, smelling of burnt pine and ash, hung with heavy black drapes of crepe – no reflected light, no ornamentation to catch the light.

He came closer to it, transfixed on the jarring change. As if in a trance, he reached out to pull back the curtain, to see if his partner was still there, as encased in ice as when he’d last seen him.

Jack hissed as a burning hand closed around his, not recognizing the grip for a moment. Not until he twisted himself, turned to stare into Pitch’s face, his sharp features alight with the glow from his hand, burning in the darkness.

“It’s been a while, Jack.” Pitch told him, his other hand coming up, twisting painfully into Jack’s hair. The pain was more to do with the heat than anything else, he found, but Jack didn’t struggle against it. He looked at Pitch for a long moment, then closed his eyes.

“Do it.” he breathed.

It was all the permission that Pitch needed, though he insisted to himself he hadn’t needed permission at all. It was a consideration, waiting before tearing into Jack’s mind, raking up handful after burning handful of the muck and shit he’d kept back there, clinging to the corners.

Jack rattled in his hands, his body shaking as he tried to keep control of himself. But that wasn’t the point, he knew it wasn’t the point; they had to be fair. Jack had altered him. He needed to alter Jack. He needed to change him, the way that he had been inherently changed, past the point of return to not understanding what mortal desire was. His hand gripped tighter in Jack’s hair and he kissed the boy’s mouth as it stretched open in its first scream.

The burst of fear wrenched through him like glory, shot down his spine and into the coil of his gut as he squeezed Jack’s wrist. It was as if some of his skin really had become ice, for it melted around Pitch’s fingertips, steaming off into the air as it rolled. Tears fell on Jack’s cheeks, freezing in their tracks, but it didn’t stop him from reaching deeper, from dredging up memories from even his human life.

Loss, loneliness – these were Jack’s sorrows, and they sang to Pitch as he played them finely. When the physical symptoms made themselves clear and Jack started to struggle, Pitch gripped him hard, forced him down to the bed, bashing his head against the headboard of it, something that would have killed any human with the force he’d put into the motion.

Jack only cried out, thrashed, froze over part of Pitch’s face. The shadows picked away at it easily, and Pitch forced another kiss onto Jack’s mouth, biting into his lips. He came away with more water, with more frost, a chunk of Jack’s mouth gone, rapidly rebuilding itself as he pieced himself back together.

His mouth tasted of honeysuckle.

“What’s happened to you, Jack?” Pitch asked him, not sure whether the feelings storming inside of him were causing his hesitation. The frost spirit shook in his hands, shook his head.

“I hate you.” the shadow king said, darkness drawing in to the two of them, the room pitch except for his hands. Jack’s face glowed red with their reflection, wet eyes staring up at his fellow god. “For making me feel this. For making me this way.”

“You did this to me.” Jack told him, barely able to breathe for all the heat at his throat, searing into his skin. He could regenerate it, but that didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

Pitch’s forehead touched his own. “I know.” he murmured, his body sliding down, lower, hips moving against Jack’s. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. But they weren’t people, and what was supposed to be had hardly ever mattered for them, hadn’t it?

“I love you so much.” Jack confessed. Pitch drug their noses against one another, their lips barely brushing. There was enchantment in his mouth, there had to be, because when he kissed it again, he swore he could feel the same heat pooling in him that he had felt restrained, all that hazy, unfocused need deep inside of him bubbling to the surface, irrepressible, inescapable.

“I know.” Pitch said, kissing Jack again. His hands moved across Jack’s face, holding it while they shared a long, intense kiss, the first inklings Pitch had of what Jack meant by a connection. It felt like one, it felt like the current of Jack’s love flowed into his body, and he found his hands moving over the boy’s body, eager to touch, to feel.

He tore open Jack’s robes, ripped at his belts, tossed the clothing aside. They all dissolved in a flutter of snowflakes on the floor, baring Jack to him. For once, Pitch saw him, saw him as his hands moved over the surface of Jack’s body, melting away the layers of ice he had been coming to call flesh.

Where he touched, the layer of ice burned away, leaving what was buried beneath to come to the surface. Beneath was Jack, his Jack, and he let his fingers feel the hollow of his throat, the curve of his ribs, the indent of his stomach and belly. He caressed his hips as he rolled his own down, again, the shadows peeling back from his own body as they made contact.

His prick was a part of the form he’d created that he’d never much thought about until now, until he felt it rub against Jack’s. Even the coolness of his body couldn’t hinder the voracious warmth that was running through his veins, and he pressed closer, kissed Jack again, tongue laving against his lips.

Jack opened easily for him, blossomed beneath his attention, as though all that yearning were earnest, more than just the childish words of a humanoid spirit. Pitch could see that now, could feel it as Jack’s body began to feel like a body, his skin cold but skin, soft and reactive. He groaned as Jack sucked on his tongue instead of biting it, rolled the tip of his over the side of Pitch’s, their lips pressed together to seal hot breaths.

He wasn’t totally oblivious to the obvious needs of the situation, but Pitch could generate most anything he needed, with his power back. But he wanted something more intimate, nearly difficult, inexplicably drawn to the more base urges for more sensation. A tendril of shadow stretched inside of Jack’s body, thick at first before it spread itself around him, thin but reaching, a perfect pressure to make the boy groan beneath him; it was an unexpectedly rewarding sound.

Their mouths met again, tongue and teeth and Pitch pressed Jack’s thighs together around his cock, wanting him so many ways. He lapped into Jack’s mouth as another shadow tendril wrapped around the boy’s prick, too, rubbing it slowly, mimicking the syncopation of the rocking of Pitch’s hips.

He had changed him, Pitch realized. He’d changed Jack as much as Jack had changed him, brought him to feel the total weight of power. They understood each other, and for reasons that he couldn’t put a finger on his heart beat hard in his chest at that thought, aching as he rolled his hips forward again.

It felt like forever and no time at all before something else ripped through him, an entirely new sensation. A blinding, animalistic pleasure as he emptied out between Jack’s thighs, something mirrored only a few moments later, the pressure around Jack’s prick and inside his body driving him to the same end.

They were ugly noises, primal feelings, transmuted by something more. The mess wiped away by his shadows, Pitch’s hands were on Jack’s face again as he curled beside him, bodies facing each other.

“Do you believe I love you now, Jack?” Pitch asked. The boy looked at him, the blue blaze of his eyes not quite so intense as to burn.

“I do.” he said, holding on to Pitch’s wrists, even though his hands burned. It was alright. Jack would get used to the warmth, he thought. “But we can’t continue like this, Pitch. We can’t have all of this responsibility. All this power. It’s too much.”

“We could manage.” Pitch murmured.

“No, we can’t. Manny couldn’t. I won’t become like him.” Jack told Pitch. “That’s where I was. Above the clouds.”

“You talked to him?” Pitch demanded, not sure whether it was protectiveness or betrayal he was feeling. Jack only drug his mouth against Pitch’s palm.

“We can make other spirits. The way he made me. But we can be better for them. We can guide them.” he said.

“It sounds suspiciously,” Pitch replied, “Like you’re demanding children now that I’ve finally bedded you.”

Jack smiled. “Maybe so.”

They fell silent with each other, laying, staring. Jack’s cheeks grew hot under Pitch’s hands. For the first time since the apocalypse, he felt warm.

-

The night came, and the night went, and Jack awakened to a great coat draped over his body. It was greyed blue, covered beneath with a soft, thick black fur and enough material to trail behind him, warm and covering his entire body as he arose, walking through his palace to find Pitch standing in his parlour.

“We can’t make a new start here, Jack.” Pitch told him. “This is… Everything from before. I’ve laid the bodies to rest… Will you take care of the castle?”

He held out a hand. Jack walked over to him, and slowly pulled off the glove the shadow king had put on it. The other came with it, and he tossed them to the floor, pressing his mouth to one, then the other.

“Only if you lead the way.” he replied.

Together, they rode out on his nightmare, waiting patiently for its master’s return. They were barely on the waves before Pitch heard the first of it, the great crevasse of Jack’s palace cracking, the great and terrible thunder as it broke off into the ocean.

It would bury the bed, and the egg, and the grief.

They laid the palace of ice to rest, and rode on together, towards the future.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, uh, okay. Thanks for sticking around!! I hope you enjoyed the fic!


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